


If You Were the Last Woman On Earth

by Vali



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Arguing, BDSM, Bickering, F/M, Psychic Bond, Rough Sex, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 17:22:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3298217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vali/pseuds/Vali
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just because your best enemy accidentally destroyed planet Earth is no reason to refuse her hospitality.  Written for the Only One Bed fanfic challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Were the Last Woman On Earth

**Author's Note:**

> Set at some unspecified time after "Last Christmas" and before "The Magician's Apprentice." All of Missy's expressed opinions of companions past and present are strictly hers, not the author's. Thank you, Nonelvis, for co-hosting the fest and for the excellent beta.

"Well?" said the Doctor. He was smiling, the clench-jawed, wide-eyed smile of someone seething to hit its recipient in the face. "Are you happy now?"

Before them, behind them and as far in every direction as they could see, there lay a blasted heath: flattened ground stripped down beyond the dirt, a few scorched tussocks of grass gone a sickly dead yellow, the remains of trees, houses, utility poles, skyscrapers littering the dust like a great discarded game of pick-up-sticks. Columns of noisome, grayish white ash hung suspended in the air, thick enough to block what little light filtered through from a sun gone a dull, diminished orange-brown; the moon was still somewhere out there, unscathed behind the ash curtain, but it and all the stars had vanished from sight.

A faint white film drifting onto her pristine violet sleeves, Missy turned her eyes toward the barren ground, then the smothering sky, then the Doctor. One side of her mouth curled upward, and she shrugged.

"Oopsie," she said.

"Are you happy now?" This was the limit, well past the limit, but once again he'd made the mistake of allowing her just that much rope and, once again, planet Earth was dangling in the noose, this time with its neck snapped well and good. "I never thought I'd miss you vomiting up one moronic Earth domination scheme after another, you were like a cat entranced with its own sick—but now you won't rest until you blast it and everything on it into the Bottomless Past? Why? Will you tell me why? Do _you_ have any idea why? Or maybe you're just buggering it up at random as you go along, because you're just that _immeasurably incompetent!_ " He sank fingers into his hair, tugging at the strands as if he might thus extract an answer, then released them in disgust. "What in the hell are you trying to prove?"

Missy, impassive throughout this tirade, permitted herself a flicker of impatience. "So you've never, ever had a laboratory experiment go even a teensy bit awry, have you, Doctor? How perfection must weigh on your aging head." She waved a hand at him in a gesture of supreme boredom. "My organic matter oscillator got away from me, the chain reaction process can get a wee bit moody at the best of times. Hardly matters, it can all be fixed."

"And what the hell is an organic matter oscil—" The Doctor stopped short, a suspicious new light dawning in his eyes. "You were trying to rebuild that bloody tissue compression eliminator, weren't you?"

Missy's eyes rolled skyward and stayed there, flitting back and forth as she swayed gently foot to foot. "I told you, Doctor, it's an _organic matter oscillator_ and it has all sorts of perfectly peaceful, benevolent uses though its architecture's a bit unstab—"

"You blew up planet Earth and incinerated every last life form standing on it, all so you could retrieve your pathetic little toy!" He seized her arm, gripping tighter as she made a rather languid attempt to pull it away. "Why? Because you were bored? Again? Because rampaging all over my timeline and making a cyber-army out of any poor dead thing you found there and vaporizing any living human being in a ten-kilometer radius, that just wasn't a jolly enough time to suit you?"

She gave him an incredulous look, then smiled. "Doctor," she said, "how long have we known each other? Answer your own question."

He was breathing hard between his teeth. "Wonderful. This is wonderful—doing this to an entire planet is your idea of fun? Because I can tell you from firsthand experience, it isn't!"

"And here comes the martyr complex, right on schedule." She yanked her arm from his grasp, occupying herself with emptying her hat brim and coat cuffs of their accumulated ash. "Do calm down, Doctor, this is hardly the end of everything. Well, it is momentarily the end of everything, but—"

"You don't even care about Earth! You've never really given a damn about ruling or destroying it, you just keep kicking it in the face over and over again because I made the mistake of letting myself get attached to it!" His own coat sleeves were less ashen, but only because his agitation was spurring the arm-waving of a mad conductor. "You're not fooling me, you know. You never have. If you wanted true power, half the universe squeezed in your fist, there's a good nine million more relevant galaxies you could make miserable instead—"

Her cheeks dimpled. "Suggestions?" 

"This isn't funny! This is quite possibly the least comedic thing you have ever done!"

"Are you going to keep stomping about and shouting and wagging your finger in my face as if that'll impress me, or are you going to _listen_?" 

Her voice, that voice whose cadences—once they'd both resumed their native tongue—was such a well-worn memory he still couldn't believe he hadn't recognized her straight off, skittered high and sing-song and dripped with a sickly syrup. The toe of one boot kicked open the black handbag at her feet; she reached down and pulled out something that looked like a 1940s military field radio, setting it down between them with a muted, dusty thud. "See? Oscillator. All I need do is reconfigure the settings, do a bio-calibration, give the temporal arc a good hard tweak and the whole planet will rebuild itself right back to where it left off, right in front of your eyes—those miserable humans and elephants and stag beetles you love so much, they'll never even know they went missing. Time lapse holography on a grand scale, Doctor, and you've got a front-row ticket. And yes, before you fret, you'll get your TARDIS back too, good as new." She wrinkled her nose in delight, a rabbit in a crate of carrots. "You're welcome."

He just stared at her, silent and seething, his fingers clenching and loosening at his sides like a pulse. Her air of good cheer unwavering, she looked him up and down and broke into another, maddeningly patient smile.

"You know, Doctor, I think I know what this is really about." Her voice dropped to a maternal coo. "Someone's overtired."

"Don't even try joking with me," he said. "Don't you dare."

"Who's joking? You've been chasing me around and around the _via lactea_ until both our poor heads are spinning, even Time Lords need their rest. Even perfect, peerless you. Not as young as you used to be, you know, even your precious Clara could see it."

"Trust me," he said, slowly, as if speaking to an obtuse child, "nothing wakes a man up like a good boiling rage. Thanks to you? I'm not the slightest bit tired."

"Well, bully for you, I am." She reached into the handbag once again, this time pulling out something that looked like a large black fabric box. "The bio-calibration won't take full effect for another eighteen hours at the earliest, you might as well have a nice refreshing nap to pass the time."

"I'm not regenerating, I don't need to fall into bed every twenty minutes like some little—"

"Well, if you won't sleep," she said, now fiddling at the oscillator's switches with swift, precise fingers, "at least be sensible and take shelter from the storm. There's a truly nasty _habūb_ brewing on the horizon, if I'm not mistaken"—without looking up she shot a laser screwdriver blast over her shoulder, causing the black box to root itself where it stood, heighten and expand—"and I don't think even you want to be blinded or suffocated just to prove a point. So just this once? Please, see sense." She jerked her chin at the black structure, still cubical, now the size of a very large tent. "Come on-a my house."

Quite deliberately he also turned his head toward the horizon, where a great, ominous grayish-white cloud was gaining breadth and depth by the second. The Doctor contemplated it, and then her.

"Never having to see that nasty, self-satisfied little smirk of yours, ever again?" He nodded. "Oh, that'd be well worth it."

Something behind her eyes flared up and then subsided, so swiftly a human might have missed it; but he didn't, and clearly, she saw he didn't. Then she let out a bark of laughter. 

"Fine!" she said. "That's just fine, you stay out here and inhale the remains of your favorite species all night if it suits you, I've got this silly oscillator reset the way _you'd_ like it and your constant tantrums have worn me out, Mummy is having a lie-down. Beddytime boys will still have a lovely surprise waiting for them in the morning, though they've done nothing to deserve it." She pointed her screwdriver at the oscillator one last time, covering it in an invisible protective dome like a flower under glass. "You know where to find me if you change your mind—"

"I won't."

"Like I said, Doctor. Suit yourself." 

She seized the handbag, whirled on her heel and, humming to herself, strolled with a jaunty, insouciant step toward the black tent. "No mar-i-golds in the pro-mised land..."

"I won't forget this!" the Doctor yelled after her.

"...there's a hole in the ground where they used to grow..."

The tent flap sealed itself shut as she entered; from inside, not a sound. The grayish-white cloud seemed to expand, growing thick and heavy where it hovered on the horizon, and took on a jaundiced glow that might or might not have been the failing sunlight. He sat on the ruined earth near the faintly humming oscillator, legs stretched out before him and arms folded across his chest, and glared fixedly at the cloud as if he could will it to approach. 

Clara, at least, was safe and, presumably, well-fed where he'd left her at the (actually quite oppressively cheerful) Sad Café on Karnübel IX, though perhaps at this very moment drumming her fingertips and glancing over her _huevos rancheros_ wondering just where the hell he was. He'd have some explaining to do when he got back there, the exact wording of which he should probably plan out now as not only had he not been entirely truthful about why he was "just ducking out for an hour or so," he'd not yet quite got around to telling her Missy was still alive. Because that would mean also having to explain why he hadn't simply finished Missy off, instead of letting her lure him from galactic pillar to astral post like a fox taunting the hound so he could—what? Talk sense into her? Put the fear of _anything_ into her? He really had learned nothing in fifteen hundred years, absolutely nothing, and that was what always, even in the worst apparent extremis, gave the Master the bloody buggering upper hand—and what was he going to tell Clara, anyway? Nothing, he suspected, not unless Missy herself forced the matter. He wasn't pleased with himself about that, not at all, but there was no point in lying to himself about it. He'd spent far too many of his lives doing just that about the Master, _ad nauseam_ and _in saecula saeculorum._

The vast, weighty, sickly-yellow cloud rose slowly in the sky and moved closer, and still closer; with its approach there began a low, but steadily increasing roar. _Come on, then,_ the Doctor thought. _I'm in just that sort of mood. Let's see what you've bloody got._

******

It was impossible to see his own hand before his face, much less the entranceway to the tent, but it seemed to sense his presence and opened just long enough to let him inside, then swiftly resealed itself against the two-hundred-decibel howl of the storm. Ears ringing, eyes sealed nearly shut, caked from head to foot in dust, bone ash and a chalky, livid powder whose origins he'd decided not to contemplate, the Doctor staggered a step or two forward, tripped on something he still couldn't see, fell to his knees, struggled to his feet and, in between titanic coughing fits, looked around him with streaming, itching eyes. 

The tent, softly lit by a lantern dangling from a ceiling hook, was just tall enough to prevent his banging his head, just wide enough to permit a few steps. One corner was a froth of skirts, petticoats, stockings, and stays tossed in a careless, teetering heap; the black handbag sat in the other. The remaining floor was almost wholly given over to a great white sleeping-cushion, like the air mattresses humans took with them on camping trips. Snowy sheets were piled up in profusion beneath a duvet of cobalt blue and beneath them, propped up on innumerable pillows, lay Missy, her hair in a loose braid and her white cambric nightgown buttoned to the neck. She sat bolt upright with a theatrical little gasp, clutching the duvet protectively to her chin, then lolled her head back on the cushions and studied him, grinning.

"Seven hours!" she said, with a dainty clapping of hands. "Well done, darling, I was certain you couldn't possibly hold out more than five. Have you quite recovered your temper? Well, even if you haven't, now I know what a yeti would look like after a year-long famine so the evening's not an utter loss."

Without deigning to reply, he scratched with two-handed vigor at his scalp, then his brows, then dog-shook his head to release a cascade of loosened char. Missy let out a very delicate, very false sneeze. 

"Doctor," she said, "you're coming dangerously close to abusing my hospitality."

He rubbed his eyes and coughed up one last, rather spectacular torrent of ash. "I'll take—" He wheezed. "—the floor, thank you."

"Oh, don't be stupid, you'd have to fold yourself up like a pocketknife—there's more than enough room right here. Though not in those filthy rags." She reached onto the pillows and tossed something at him, another bundle of cloth. "Here. I wear it whenever I'm feeling nostalgic."

The bundle, shaken out, was a man's nightshirt, white linen with white lacings at the neck and a hemline flapping around his knees. He made a last futile attempt to shake his clothes clean, then quite deliberately tossed them and their collected ash atop her own and pulled the nightshirt over his head. Missy made an ostentatious show of moving from the center of the mattress toward the tent wall, briskly patting the empty space, and the Doctor crawled in beside her, staying close as possible to the mattress edge and, when his shin brushed against hers, making an ostentatious show of jerking it away.

"I'm afraid I haven't got a bolster to place between us, that's what happens when you pack at the last minute." She sounded inordinately pleased with herself, so much so it set the Doctor's teeth back on edge. "No matter, I'm sure we can still maintain propriety somehow—"

"Believe me," he muttered, rolling on his side, "you needn't have the slightest fear."

Even with his back turned he could sense her self-satisfaction filling the room, like a particularly cloying perfume. He ignored it as best he could, glowering at the tent's far wall while she stretched down to the foot of the bed, retrieved a book, and sat back with a crinkling whir of pages, singing a tuneless melody beneath her breath. She laughed suddenly, a muted snort, as if stifling intense amusement at whatever she was reading. An illustrated chronicle of pan-galactic war crimes or something similarly droll, no doubt. The storm, in retrospect, might have proved better company. 

The soft, inchoate noises became louder, a sustained, increasingly annoying hum. He ignored it. Not a word, not one word.

"I remembered a nightlight for you," she noted, as brightly as if they'd been chatting away all along. "You used to flounder so in the dark, after all."

Not a word. There were a few moments of welcome quiet, then he heard rustling sounds as Missy, apparently abandoning her book, pulled the covers back up to her waist. "But of course," she noted, even more brightly, "now you've got your little Clara to make all the monsters go away! She is a plucky one, isn't she?" Missy laughed. "'Plucky,' such a jaunty euphemism for 'insufferably self-satisfied.' But then, I know what you like, and there's nothing you like better than some lower life form sending you scurrying into the depths of hell." The brightness had gone brittle, a gleaming spun-sugar thing that would shatter with one bite, but still, she seemed truly amused. "As they like to say"—she shifted, momentarily, to a nasal, flattened English—"'Buddy, you got issues.'"

Bargain-basement baiting, this. So what else was new? His leg cramping too persistently to ignore, the Doctor rolled onto his back, folding his hands behind his head. Using all his considerable powers of concentration, he visualized a daisy, slowly unfurling from the black cloth ceiling as though it were a rich stretch of soil. Or he tried to, anyway, with that bloody maddening humming like a gnat buzzing deep in his ear.

"Oh, my! I just realized, it should've been you _had_ got Clara, shouldn't it?" Missy said, most sweetly. "Not _have._ I do apologize. All repaired soon enough, though, more's the pity."

The daisy, clear in his mind's eye, appeared to be sprouting thorns. A specially bred hybrid, perhaps.

"I just don't know what you'd ever do without her, Doctor—or the one before that, or the one before that, or the one before the one before the one before that. I mean, who else in all the universe would ever understand you like she or she or she or he or she desperately imagined they did? How would you ever go on?"

Thorns, or were those teeth? In fact, his "daisy" now had the spiky, lobular appearance of a Venus flytrap. Snap. Snap.

The mattress shifted as Missy pushed herself higher against the pillows. Silence, again, for a moment or two.

"Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead—"

"Oh, shut up!" he shouted, grabbing the book from her hands and, without even glancing at the cover, tossing it across the tent. "You wanted to sleep? Then sleep!"

"You're really incredibly rude, Doctor, all these centuries and you've yet to learn simple manners. It's all right, though." Missy tapped a playful fingertip against his nose, let it rest against the bridge. "I know how scaaaaary those old rhymes can be, when someone's got an impressionable little mind."

He pushed away her hand, another gnat. "Don't touch me."

"I'm only offering a bit of comfort for when the nightmares get too—"

"I said, don't touch me."

She folded her hands decorously in her lap, studying him sidelong; she'd scrubbed her face of its cosmetic carapace but a few mascara traces still clung to her lashes, little stray drops of ink. "Still angry, I see."

"I warned you this wasn't a joke. Not to me."

"Yes, well, I could've worked that out myself, dear—you'd need a sense of humor for that, and you'll regenerate Zygon-shaped before you develop one of those." She ran fingers along the edge of her braid, idly playing with the ends. "Not that you care, I realize, but this really was a garden-variety accident. An incredibly entertaining one, I admit, but an accident. That's all."

The Doctor sighed, raising his eyes once more to the ceiling. "Am I being punished for something?" he demanded, of no one in particular.

Missy's teeth sank, rather eagerly, into her lower lip. "Would you like to be?"

"Seriously, did you regenerate idiot-shaped? Do you understand that I don't care if you _accidentally_ incinerated billions of living things and their entire ecosystem, in the process of _deliberately_ manufacturing an environmentally toxic handheld killing machine? Is that concept penetrating your skull at all?" The Doctor wrenched a flattened pillow from beneath his shoulder blades, punching it back into shape with much more vigor than necessary. "You know who else does this kind of thing? All the time? With nauseating, clockwork regularity? Humans. That's who. So don't ever let me catch you claiming they need your superior authority and wisdom, because you know what, I will laugh. Loudly. Right in your face."

Missy frowned. "Who said a thing about wisdom, Doctor? I just enjoy making them miserable, as flies to wanton boys and all that. Or wanton girls. And as for thinking I'm a font of wisdom and guidance...well. Pot. Kettle. Deepest, darkest midnight black."

They stared across the pillows at one another, neither willing to blink first. 

"How do you do that, by the way?" she asked. "That new thing, where when you're angry your eyes go taller and wider like some sort of cartoon character's—you should see it, it's like they inflate, it's quite charming. And those eyebrows, you can't do anything by halves, can you? Desert to rainforest in one regeneration." She tilted her head, pursing her lips as she perused him more closely. "And poor thing, you look so old now."

"I am old. It fits." He tilted his head in turn, a deliberate mirror. "We both are."

She lifted up her braid of hair, inspecting it just as she had his face. "Why, look at that, not a single silver strand. Some of us," she noted, tossing it back over her shoulder, "refuse to bow to the so-called inevitable. We fight it. We conquer. We _win._ "

"You wish."

She blinked. "Pardon me?"

She wasn't smiling anymore, he noticed. Good. "That kind of fighting?" he said. "I've nothing to do with it."

"Until one of your little baboon bairns snivels and whines and cries loudly enough. Right?"

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, took the scant few steps across the tent and pressed an ear to the wall. Through the thick cloth he could just hear it, the storm's screaming frenzy muted to a faint, low vibrato. Abating? Worsening? He couldn't tell. He slid back beneath the duvet, tossing the offending pillow onto the floor beside Missy's book.

"Wrong, actually," he said. "Whatever you might believe, I don't twist the universe into unnatural shapes, just to try and please them. I don't corrupt time to give them what they really want, what they'd kill to have—what they do kill to try and have. Youth and love and sex and riches and unchallenged power and unbroken companionship and unending immortality, now there's a childish cobble of fantasies—"

"Unless one of them is all sad-sack and sobby-blue, because her soldier boy was stupid enough not to raise his head and look before he goosesteps across the street—then, we've got to move heaven and earth just to get him back. Because the Great-She-Is control freak commands you to bring him back." Her eyes, always unnaturally intense, were sparking. "Then none of your little rules apply at all and never did, do they?"

The Doctor considered this, then shrugged. "You know, we don't have to wonder if _I_ regenerated idiot-shaped—we both know it. It's a perennial event." He smiled now himself, just fleetingly. He couldn't help it. "And idiots have one great privilege afforded us: We get to be consistently inconsistent." 

He stretched his legs out where he lay, observing as if they were someone else's the long narrow toes, the thin calves, the knobbly knees poking up from beneath the white linen. "You revel in misery," he said. "I do what I can, when I can, to assuage it, even when my efforts are utterly ludicrous, even when I know at the very start that they're doomed to fail. It's what I do. You truly wouldn't understand. Never have, never will."

"And how," Missy demanded, "is that not fighting?"

"Spitting into the wind," he said, "isn't the same as making it rain."

Missy's brow knitted. Then she bent her head forward, letting her braid fall down along her collarbone; she released it from its black clasp, combing out the pieces of hair with her fingers, and began swiftly replaiting it. Almost, he thought—though it couldn't be so—as if a sudden awkwardness had made her seek out something, anything, to do with her hands. That, or the hair clasp was a poison-tipped dart. Either way his first flush of rage was rapidly receding, like a howling, lethal storm slowly spinning out and diminishing to a mere backdrop of random destruction.

"So," he asked, at length, "what are you reading?"

Not receiving an answer, he reached down to the floor, recovered the book and read the title in some surprise. " _Watership Down?_ Hardly up your alley, I'd have thought. Other than the Woundwort bits."

"I got bored. So bored, I set myself the dreary task of reading every book you ever babbled on about—am I really meant to admire little Hazel? Really? He's just so...wet."

"Wet or not," said the Doctor, "he unleashed a horrifying superweapon on a completely unsuspecting and outmatched opposition, I'd have thought you'd—"

" _Spoilers,_ sweeeeee-tie!"

Her expression was as piercing and nasty as her words. The Doctor stared at her, steadily, then set the book back on the floor and turned away.

"Oh, please," she said, "not the theatrically grieving widower, still. Talk about done to death."

"I'm not discussing this with you," he said. Quite calmly, considering.

"Giving up all her regenerations, every one, just for little old you? Oh, that really must've got you going." Missy straightened the crumpled bedsheets with a relentless hand, wrenching them fore and aft as if they struggled in her grasp. "Deranged, meaningless, groveling self-sacrifice as foreplay, that does sound right up your alley—would've put me off for life, let me tell you. Even the humans say that, that the only thing worse than an unbeliever is an apostate—"

"I will never," he repeated, "discuss this with you. Not even as an idle aside. Not for a bribe. Not under torture. Not if you leave the Earth a smoking shell, fly back off to Gallifrey and maroon me here for the rest of eternity. And you know I mean it. So don't waste my time, and don't waste your breath."

The silence stretched out between them.

"You know," she finally said, "if you'd just talk like that more often you'd really get the girls falling at your feet."

The lantern above their head rattled and swung hard on its hook, as if the winds outside had somehow penetrated the tent, and then the walls, the ceiling, the piles of pillows trembled in the grip of a sudden, intense earthquake; the Doctor's shoes, teetering atop the besmirched pile of clothes, tumbled from their perch and rolled across the floor, and the contents of his pockets seemed to leap out and fly toward them in pursuit. Missy nodded to herself, as though this confirmed something, while the tremors slowed, weakened, ceased as abruptly as they'd begun.

"That's the oscillator gearing up," she said. "Just think of it as a great blender, whirring up all that nourishing primordial soup—see? Didn't I say as much? Even with the storm not yet over." Her face hardened. "Despite what you say, I do sometimes keep a promise."

Kneeling on the mattress, the Doctor grabbed his sonic screwdriver as it and several cat's-eye marbles rolled past, pointing it at the tent's far wall; in his fingertips, with that peculiar eighth sense only Time Lords possessed, he perceived a heated whirl of carbon, hydrogen and sulfur, a sharp sparking of nitrogen, a dank and slow-spreading odor of cyanobacteria, and, from somewhere far beneath and far beyond, a dimensionally sequestered, but wholly intact type-40 TARDIS with a defunct chameleon circuit. Still intact, still alive, his mind and all his senses promised him; though he could never be certain exactly how he felt this, how he knew this, nor particularly wished to be. Still on his knees he pivoted toward Missy, feeling in his hearts not the slightest trace of gratitude.

"Fine," he said. "You're actually deigning to repair something you broke. Keep that up and in a few thousand years, you might nearly be fit for mixed company."

The lantern, its internal works concussed by the earthquake, flared up strobe-like several times and then went dark. The Doctor pointed his screwdriver at it, patiently switching gears up and down and back again until the soft, pinkish-yellow light returned. He could sense Missy watching him, and didn't acknowledge it.

"So do they know?" she asked him, after several minutes.

He'd resettled himself beneath the duvet, observing the shadows around the tent as the lamplight flickered, briefly weakened, then recovered and steadied. _Imagine, Glaucon, a group of persons in a cave..._ "Does who know what?"

"Your TARDIS menagerie, of course. Who else ever matters to you?" Missy drew her blanketed knees up close to her chin, wrapped her arms around them. "Do any of them even suspect, any of them, that you used to be utterly terrified of the dark?"

He rolled over, propping himself up on an elbow as he faced her. "If they did," he replied, "they'd know I appreciate one of the universe's most primal and ubiquitous fears, and that I'm not laughing at it. Who knows, they might even feel grateful. Besides," he added, "what if they did know? What's that to you?"

She rested her chin against her knees, leaning in closer. "I know all your deepest, truest fears," she declared, lingering luxuriantly over the words as if savoring the most intoxicating Gribischine wine. "And I know every disaster they've ever caused. Every weakness, every hesitation, every stumble and slip-up and morbid anxiety and hasty retreat and thwarted opportunity and panicked cockup and fatal delay and every last time you simply lost your rabbity little brains, turned tail and ran, ran, ran--what would you think if I told them about all of it, and how many of them aren't here anymore because _you_ couldn't keep your head when it mattered?" Her voice dropped to a gleeful whisper. "What would your Traken princess or your jumped-up shopgirl or that sad worshipful thing with her sonic lippy have thought of you, if they'd known just what a blundering, hopeless coward you really are?"

The Doctor listened impassively, letting it all play out like a record he couldn't be bothered to get up and change. "Is this meant to provoke me?" he asked, when she paused for breath. "Because if it is, I'm sorry, you've seriously lost the knack."

"You can't play up to me like you can to them. You can't make me imagine you're brave—and that's what you really can't forgive. For all your posturing and moralizing and sanctimonious touch-me-not-oh-vile-diseased-thing that's what really makes you furious, the fact that you'll never be able to fool me into thinking you're some kind of conquering hero—"

"What would _you_ think, poor innocent mistreated Time Lady, if I told them all about the Forest of Erysich?" 

The tone arm flew from its groove, the record stopping mid-song. Missy gazed at him, the spark in her eyes rekindled and snapping like a campfire growing hungry for the surrounding brush. 

"Well?" he demanded. "You couldn't shut up not ten seconds ago, so tell me, at great operatic self-pitying length if it suits you—what if I did that? What would you think?"

The sparks flew upwards and flared, then, after a brief but obvious battle, she recovered her bearings. "Well," she said lightly, "it hardly matters, because you wouldn't."

"Oh, yes I would." He was enjoying himself now, in a way he didn't care to examine, but he also didn't intend to stop. "Why shouldn't I? Why wouldn't I? Maybe when all this is done I'll leave here and find all my old companions, all the living ones, and share it with them one by one—and if you get to any of them first, why then I'll just tell the first random stranger I meet, or the first ten, or the first hundred, and you know I meet an awful lot of strangers." He nodded, contemplating this plan forward and backward as he said it aloud, that part of him he didn't care to examine finding it inspired, brilliant even. "And then, when I've told the whole story, and left out not one single detail, we'll all sit back and enjoy a good, long laugh."

The sparking and flaring were a four-alarm fire. She was biting her lips and the inside of a reddening cheek, no coy nibbling now but gnawing hard at the flesh in her efforts to remain calm. "They'd never even understand what you were talking about," she hissed. "Nothing to them but babble. Nothing."

"Possibly so," he agreed. "Possibly so. But you? You'd still know that the secret was out of the box, out of your purview, out of your control, being bandied all about the universe for all the remainder of time, and that I'm the only one who could have done it."

The walls shook again, caught up in another wave of planetary tremors, and something hit the floor with a dull, weighty thud. He didn't need the screwdriver now to smell the nitrogen coursing through the atmosphere outside. Within the tent the only sound was Missy's breathing; air drawn in through the nostrils, pulled circuitously through the secondary respiratory system and, after a small eternity, exhaled with glacial slowness from the mouth. An old Academy exercise, taught to enable distance and self-control under the worst of circumstances, one that he had failed so many attempts to master he had simply lost count. 

Erysich. Far from the Citadel, far past Mount Perdition, an ancient, untouched forest stretching hundreds of kilometers—so they said—in all directions and so vast, so dense, so blind-dark even in the reddest sunlight that as a boy the mere thought of the place frightened him, so much that not even the Master's worst, most scabrous mockery could induce him to go explore it. _Pathetic,_ said the boy the Master once was, over and over again. _Scared of trees? On top of everything else, do you seriously get knock-kneed over_ pieces of wood? _You're lucky I don't just drag you there and let you find your own way back—even for you, this is pathetic._

But pathetic or not, the Doctor wouldn't go, and no threat or bribe or attempted trickery could make him even consider it. Not until years later, when they were both at the Time Academy, when the Master bolted from the Citadel gates and ran like a whole paradox of Reapers was pursuing him, ran frantic and wild and with the preternatural energy of panic straight into the Forest of Erysich and kept on running in disoriented circles, flying like a shuttlecock among the blind-dark trees. The Doctor had followed hard on his friend's heels, stumbling over slippery clumps of undergrowth and tree roots thicker than his arm, any lingering night terrors shoved brutally aside by the genuine, wholly rational fear that his friend had finally gone too far, that he might at that very moment be running himself to death. And the Master almost had, the Doctor knew. He really almost had.

"I warned you," the Doctor said to Missy, any sympathy the memory might have dredged from him overpowered by anger. "But of course you didn't listen to me, because you never listen to anyone. That wasn't cowardice. It was sense. Even back then, I had a few shreds of it. I warned you."

Missy's breathing deepened. Her fingers, resting on the bedcovers, twitched with a barely restrained need to lash out and strike.

Scarabs, that was what Academy students had called the fingertip-sized metal discs that were some of the most closely guarded, most expressly proscribed treasures of the Cardinality: They were the mind's eye into the heart of the Untempered Schism, the dream-states and hyper-dimensional hallucinations they induced the only way to gaze at the unveiled face of time without suffering inevitable, irreversible, agonizing death. (There were stories that something like them, something utilizing the sap of a long-extinct plant, had been used in religious rituals very long ago, but the whole idea of Time Lords submitting to the sub-Gallifreyan irrationalities of faith was so ludicrous nobody, not even the Doctor, could quite bring themselves to believe it.) They weren't objects of mere manufacture; their contents were a terrifyingly finite resource, their exquisite creation the fruit of a century's apprenticeship, the exact methods and means of their use so secret that once—so it was said—the punishment for any interloper's spying had been to have both tongue and eyes summarily, and permanently, removed.

The unveiled face of time. Absolutely not for students of their rank, too complex, too dangerous, above all far too rare and precious and important. And thus the Master's fevered curiosity, his outrage at exclusion from the Cardinality's deepest secrets, his conviction that all mediation, moderation, limits were beneath him nearly killed him. He'd "borrowed" a scarab, made as many duplicates as he could manage—to this day, the Doctor still had no idea how he'd done it—and tinkered obsessively with their biochemical composition until he had something that was to the original item as a hydrogen bomb was to an atomic. They were both going, the Master whispered to the Doctor, cradling two of the things as carefully as if they might, in fact, explode in his palm. They were going to the outermost reaches of space and time and superreality, just the two of them, no Cardinals, no rules, no limits. Just them. What they saw, together, would render all rules and limits irrelevant. They would be to Time Lords what Time Lords were to the remainder of the universe: the wisest of kings, the most far-seeing of priests. They would be gods. Gods, together.

 _No,_ the Doctor had said, simply, and irrevocably. The Master's disbelief, and then his rage, were a well through whose depths the Doctor plummeted, a solitary stone, knowing he would never strike the bottom.

"I warned you," he said once more.

Missy's teeth ground together, her face gone scarlet. "All your fault," she spat at him, shaking. "Everything that happened that day was your fault, and you have the gall to throw it in my face? To threaten to blackmail me, humiliate me, with what _you_ did to me? Everything after that, everything, it was all because of you. Don't you ever try to deny it. You're already coward enough." 

_No,_ the Doctor had told him, simply and irrevocably. So, of course, the Master had simply ambushed him, one afternoon outside his Academy rooms, forcibly pressing a scarab to the Doctor's neck at the same time he placed another at his own throat. And the Doctor, instinctively, had tried to pull the thing from his flesh—too late to evade its instantaneous effects—and in their struggles its loosened pricking-points had caught the Master on the hand, a double dose of his own godhead. And then they were both seized by the same enthrallment, a vision of themselves as small boys being led in a line to a literal, a material Untempered Schism, gripped on the shoulders by talon-like adult fingers and forced to gaze unceasingly into its depths, and even though the line of boys was mere hallucination the Untempered Schism itself was real, even in their mutual dream-state they knew what they saw was real, and before it they were no gods but the lowest spawn of flies and there was no respite, no mercy, no escape—

The Doctor had passed out cold, waking hours later sprawled alone on the tiles, but though the dream's predatory talons had mercifully released him he knew, he could actually envision like a map unrolled before him where the Master had gone. And so he followed hard on the Master's heels, over the undergrowth and the tree roots and into a darkness that would have paralyzed his boy-self with fear, and after hours that felt like days found the Master crouched in a clearing, sobbing and rocking back and forth before a host of invisible demons. He'd pissed himself, and worse. Still dizzy and sick from his own, half-strength ordeal, the Doctor first tried to coax and then roughly dragged the Master from his imagined hiding place, repeating an endless litany of _it didn't happen, it didn't happen_ as the Master babbled on and on about the Schism and the hidden face of Rassilon and why would they do that to him, a little boy in short breeches, why would they push him into the bottomless abyss and now he would have to run and run and hide and hide, and Omega was after them both and the darkness, the darkness and finally the Doctor had roared, _Stop it! STOP! Just stop it right now or I'll hurt you, I'm not joking, I swear I'll have your tongue and eyes myself—_

And he'd meant it, he'd meant every word because he'd seen it too, seen the truth contained in the window-dressing of a dream and there was no turning back, not for either of them, not ever. There was also no taking the Master to the Academy infirmary, not after what he'd done, so the Doctor hauled them both back to his own rooms, cleaned the Master up as best he could, put him to bed and sat watching him tremble and claw his way back to reality, the Doctor's own exhaustion and residual horror attacking him in waves until, somehow, he passed through it to a newfound, wholly alien sense of calm. He'd gone then to the Master's rooms, methodically searching them and confiscating every last accursed scarab (the Master's research notes, too, using their guidance to drain the things of their horrid potency until, when Clara found them millennia later lying forgotten in a TARDIS drawer, he was able—for a while—to dismiss them as sleep-patches and change the subject). He'd returned to his own, seen the Master seemingly asleep, and was about to drop half-dead on the floor when the Master's arms reached out, pulled the Doctor into bed, drew their bodies together in sustained, absolute silence. 

And that, the Doctor mordantly reflected, had been their first night together as lovers. The blissful, moon-in-June romance! The delights of kissing a mouth that had quite clearly, quite recently been sick! The herculean efforts, even in that absurd flush of youth, of staying hard when you were this close to fainting from fatigue! The awful rewards of being stone cold brilliant and without any self-control, any restraint whatsoever! Of course he'd never told Clara, of course he'd never tell her. It wasn't just the truth was too complex and painful; it was all far too horribly embarrassing.

He studied Missy's hands, the tremors that still gripped them, and then his own, steady and still. "I never know with you," he said, "if you remember what really happened that day, or if you think everything we saw was what really was. And you confuse me too, I was up to my neck in it just like you wanted me to be, like it or not—" He broke off, shaking his head. How many times had the Master referred to their "Academy initiation" as though it were no hallucination at all; how many times had he, the Doctor, found himself drawn back into that unwanted _folie à deux_ , startled each time he re-(re-re-)remembered that none of it ever happened, that no entity anywhere on Gallifrey even deigned to notice children that young? He didn't appreciate that, didn't appreciate it at all. Nor that it inspired in him words he would have scorned, out of hand, had they come from even a much-loved human: _But the thing is, it all just seemed so real._

"I offered you the universe," Missy replied, with an air of wrathful triumph. "Absolute power, ultimate knowledge, I gave you everything and you turned it down. Like you always turn it down, because you're too damned frightened of becoming what the universe always meant us both to be—and don't pretend it's about _morals_ or _ethics_ or any of your pretty weasel words, I knew you when and you were terrified of your own shadow." A skein of hair slipped from her braid and her fingers corralled it furiously, twisting it back into place nearly hard enough to break the strands. "And everyone else's shadow, and the most harmless garden snakes, and thunderstorms and Zagreus and Academy tutors and soldiers and Reapers and monsters under the bed and the very idea of setting foot more than ten kilometers outside the Citadel walls. And the crying, at the drop of a hat or a sock or a single petal off a daisy? It was pathetic. I feared nothing." She fumbled with the black hair clasp, snapping it shut again only after a half-dozen clumsy attempts. "Even after—after Erysich, I feared nothing."

 _Why?_ the Doctor almost said aloud, with an infinite sense of weariness. _Why do you always lie to me? Always? About everything? And why does it still catch me out, when you were like this from the very start?_ He himself, he'd been so painfully earnest as a boy that the thought of it made him wince but, oh, the stories the Master had spun, right from the start, tales of family, wealth, servants, scholarly patrons, a genetic lineage stretching back two hundred generations and then some; his name, of course, down for the Time Academy at birth. Not a word of it true, and not the slightest shame when he was found out. His parents were lowest-level functionaries, kind people—sometimes the Doctor caught himself pretending they were his parents too, that he and his newfound friend were brothers—but a little dull and (mercifully, for their sakes) unambitious. Those family "estates" were a stretch of worthless scrubland, creeping a few meters short of the foot of Mount Perdition and then, like the Master's motherline itself, abruptly, wearily giving up the ghost. 

Still, considering the Doctor himself owned only the clothes on his back, the shoes on his feet, and a few treasured castoffs—discarded books, a carved ulanda-wood recorder, a river-worn stone with interesting cobalt striations—he'd been impressed. And there was _a_ servant, of sorts, a taciturn, down-on-his-luck maternal cousin who, when the boys tramped inside after day-long treks through the fields, laundered their dusty tunics and ladled out endless bowls of stew for his board and keep. (The future, the Doctor thought in gloomier moments, that he had to look forward to himself, if he proved unworthy even to be tossed to the military wolves.) His family, the Master once confided in a rare flash of candor, hadn't fallen in the world so much as failed, over long millennia of mediocrity, ever to take flight. Still, none of it seemed to bother the Master overmuch; clearly he believed it all a fleeting mistake, that the powers of his own mind would let him sail through the Time Academy, into full Prydonian privileges, honors and regenerations and all the attendant glories of Gallifrey, and far beyond. And, if only for a very little while, he'd been right.

"And why," the Doctor demanded now, "would it be so terrible to fear Erysich? Just because I did?"

Missy sighed, a harsh sound of sincere exasperation. "I'd never have had to try to force you, if you weren't such a—"

"And if you'd understood why _anyone with any sense_ would have said no, never, absolutely not, you'd never have tried to force me." He grabbed a handful of duvet and yanked it towards him, so roughly Missy made an indignant face, and pulled it over his shoulder as he turned his back to her. "And if I have to have any more of your sparkling conversation I'll walk out there and hurl myself into the nearest sinkhole with a song in my hearts, so tell anyone you like whatever you like, tell them I'm Rassilon's long-lost seventeenth wife if it suits you, just _shut up_ once and for all."

Missy slid beneath the covers, saying nothing more. The minutes, and possibly the hours, ticked by. The Doctor closed his eyes, a semblance of sleep he maintained for himself rather than her, but he was the least fooled of anyone and as the hours, the minutes ticked by, his legs moved restlessly beneath the sheets and he twitched, an irritating little insect-bite sensation in his hips and shoulder blades, to turn back over on his other side. He refused to do it. He wasn't offering any more talk, any more eye-to-eye, anything to acknowledge there was anyone else occupying this temporary bed. Thank you for the shelter, now go to hell. And don't expect anyone, especially not me, to ever waste a second searching there for you.

 _Must you_ sprawl _like that?_ the Master would always ask him, in snappish irritation, when they'd regularly or sporadically shared a bed. The Doctor slept like a starfish, arms and legs flung out in profligate profusion, while the Master would claim a small oblong of space and occupy it with the serene stillness of a corpse in a coffin. Unnerving, frankly, but the Master seemed perfectly comfortable. They'd talk endlessly, long hoarse hours of argument, one-upmanship, braggadocio, scornful putdown, scholarly speculation, scattershot philosophizing, simple aimless conversation, until sleep or other pursuits pulled them both into an abrupt or gradual silence. Their own words were a veil drawn against not just the outside world but against the realization, even then, that all the words in the universe would never help them know or understand one another. Their echo, though, that lingered in their heads long after they'd both risen and gone their separate ways. Now, however, as Missy lay beside him in her accustomed, invisible pine box, the Doctor heard and felt nothing but an uneasy, deafening quiet.

The truth was, he was bored lying here in total silence. Bored beyond all measure and belief. Bone- and blood- and cell-deep hostility, it turned out, beat boredom by a country mile.

"Those were the coordinates, you know," she said, with no warning. "If you care. And you can tell anyone you like who gave them to you."

The Doctor opened his eyes, turned where he lay and regarded Missy, face to face, once more.

"I'm close enough to throttle you," he said. "And you know I'm not the least frightened to try. So I'm just warning you, right now, don't you dare."

"Those were the coordinates." She rose up against the pillows, protuberant eyes bigger and wider with a hostile, challenging solemnity. "No ifs, no ands, no numbers omitted. I didn't lie."

"My fingers are itching," the Doctor said between his teeth, rising up in turn. "Madly itching. They wouldn't at all mind snapping something."

"In Camberwell New Cemetery in Honor Oak, South London, England, United Kingdom, Western Hemisphere, planet Earth, at Greenwich Mean Time 4:33 p.m. on 12 December 2014, I recited to you, in anticipation of my imminent incarceration or death, the exact, precise, wholly accurate coordinates of the location of the planet Gallifrey." She was sitting up perfectly straight now, no cunning or caginess in her face but only a cold, implacable fury matching his note for note. "Not for any bribe, not under torture, my answer will not change because _I didn't lie._ But just because it's there didn't mean you were going to find it just sitting there, waiting, out in the open, and if you really want it as badly as you insist? Maybe, just maybe, you should get down off your high horse, put that aging shoulder to the wheel, and _look._ " 

She pressed her thumb and index finger together, drawing them swiftly across her lips. "Further affiant sayeth not."

He stared at her. The skin across the back of his skull had tightened, prickling with an intense heat. "I really could kill you," he said. "I'm not joking. I'm not joking in the least."

Her eyes were bright with anger, hungry with the prospect of violence. "Then do it. You've left me to die before. You've seen me die before. You've disposed of the remains, all by your lonesome—it's nothing to you, is it? So go ahead. Vent all your frustrations and mistakes and miseries all over me, just like your favorite new housepet ordered you to do. Just like I would do to you. Because _that's what both of us are made of._ " She wrenched at the collar of her nightgown, pulling the top buttons free to better expose her throat. "Well? I'm waiting. Just one last request, before you send me off forever? When you do figure out how Gallifrey is hiding right there in plain sight, before your lying eyes—and it may take you centuries, but even fool that you are, you will—and you set foot back on the old _Blut und Boden,_ never forget it's me who told you where to find it? And if that's all I told you about it, and nothing more, that was just my way of saying, darling, I warned you."

She watched him. She waited. No more anger, no defiance, only measured expectation. His fingers itched, twitched with the need to squeeze until something bent and broke, and spent themselves against fistfuls of the bedclothes. His breath was audible in his own ears, no Academy training capable of slowing it, soothing it. Minutes passed. Or hours.

"I've never told a soul about Erysich," he finally said. "And I never would."

She exhaled, as though she'd been holding her own breath, awaiting her fate. Then she laughed, mirthless and bitter. "And why not? After all, your apes understand you so much better than I ever could, you love them enough to wallow in bestiality every chance you get—why don't you tell them all about it, while you all drink a few rounds to celebrate my happy demise? Why don't you just _do as you were told,_ and then go out on the town and celebrate!"

The Doctor took his time contemplating his answer. "I don't think," he said, "that I'm going to tell you why not. And do you know what the best part is about not telling you?"

Missy rolled her eyes. "His hair's turned to silver but his tongue's a block of lead—let me guess, Doctor, tit for dullard's tat, the best part about not telling me is...not telling me?"

He shook his head. "The best part about not telling you," he said, "is never having to abandon the hope that someday, somehow, by some miracle that even I can't imagine, you'll see the answer, waiting, all this time, out in the open, and figure it out for yourself."

Her derision seemed to dissolve there and then, like a sickly-sweet sugar in hot, bracing tea; her smile had faded, her expression was uncertain. When she wasn't sneering or smirking or wrinkling her nose in saccharine, murderous disdain her face could be a halfway pleasing thing, strong bold lines and sharp, distinct planes overlaid with what, close up, was soft, delicate-seeming flesh. The high vaulting browline and pale, heavy-lidded eyes suited her, prosceniums over windows through which streamed clear, if often harsh and unforgiving light. He realized, suddenly, that he had been staring at her for quite some time.

"Could I ask you something?" she said, as if just to break the silence.

He ran a hand through his hair, feeling a strange urge to laugh. "Why stop now?" 

"Why haven't you ever thanked me for introducing you to your wife—your real wife, I mean, not the parade of primates after her? That's gratitude for you." She turned sulky. "I was rather proud of that, you were both so _sweet_ together if one likes that sort of thing, but I suppose in your muddled butter-brains it was all you the conquering swain all along. As if anyone but you ever thought you ruled that roost."

True enough, the Master had pushed them both into each other's path—though the "introduction" had consisted of _I can't be bothered with family charity cases during exams but you, now you've been sent down you've got years on your hands. Entertain her, or something._ Nor could he, the Doctor, deny he'd been instantly smitten—something about her, her coppery hair and oval face and the unmistakable melancholy lurking beneath her always brisk, often brash, sometimes brazen talk felt intriguing and new and yet entirely familiar, even though he was certain he'd never, before that moment, known the Master's servant-cousin even had a daughter. They ran off together. They married—or at least, they considered themselves married. They had children. They'd been very happy, for a while, anyway. The Master seemed to find it all very amusing. And irrelevant to anything between the Doctor and himself.

"I am terribly grateful for that," the Doctor said, quite sincerely. "Though all things considered—like the fact she already had a husband—I don't know why you bothered."

"Hardly stopped either of you, did it?" Missy shrugged. "You were always going on and on and on about wanting a whole passel of brats but never actually doing anything about it, so I decided to arrange things. She seemed like she'd suit you. And she did. Some of us," she noted, "like giving our friends what makes them happy, I do wish that were a more commonplace—"

"You know," the Doctor interrupted, so absorbed in the discussion he'd drawn very slightly nearer, "I seem to recall you married a human too, a primate from the whole parade of primates. That's different how, exactly?"

Missy snorted in disdain. "You're not seriously comparing that, are you, Doctor? Really? As anyone but you could've worked out, a tiresome necessity. Purely political."

"Not entirely," the Doctor said. "Not on observation, really, and no matter how awful and sadistic a way you had of showing it. You forget, I was there. You made certain of that."

Missy seemed to have become fascinated with the folds and creases of the sheets. "Must we really talk about those particular days? I'm not terribly fond of remembering—"

"Tough," said the Doctor. Without rancor—even now, after everything that'd happened since, he couldn't recall those days without a sense of pity she'd have despised—but still, he wasn't going to yield. "You ravage my entire timeline like Achilles sacking Troy, I dredge up a few self-inflicted embarrassments, it hardly begins to equate."

Her teeth gritted. "I said, _I don't want to talk about_ —"

"Like I said." He kicked impatiently at the newly twisted bedclothes, pulling one leg free. "Tough."

Missy closed her eyes hard for a moment. Then they opened as abruptly as those on a child's doll set upright, so it almost surprised him not to hear a soft porcelain _click._ "You made a fool of me," she said. "In front of all your drooling little minions and myrmidons, in front of that nauseating freak-thing even you didn't want on your TARDIS, you timed it all so precisely, so perfectly, just so you could bask in the glory of rubbing it in my face—"

"Glory?" He really was going to burst out laughing, from sheer disbelief. "If you think there was anything glorious about that day, for me, for anyone—" 

"You humiliated me!" she shouted. "And you loved it! The whole planet calling out for you, all at once, all of them watching His Angelic Majesty play the benevolent all-forgiving savior, typical self-serving way to tart up the boot you had to my neck—it's why I didn't give a damn what became of me or how it happened as long as I got to hear you _weep._ And that was a fraction, a crumb, of what you deserved." Her breath was fast and shallow now, a choleric steam-hiss. "I've never forgiven you for that. And I never will."

"Of course not," he said. "How could you? You never forgive anything." He was suddenly very bored with the conversation, never mind it was his own fault for starting it; they'd trod this particular dry scrubland so many, many times, not once ever approaching the other side. "Never have, never will. But you know what, that makes all our little talks so restful, because I never need make the least effort. I never have to waste time defending myself, because whatever I've done in any circumstance, even if it's rescuing you from destroying yourself a thousand ways before breakfast, it's always a foul, unforgivable outrage against you—"

"You and your sodding fairy tales about rescuing me—you were ready to kill me! On her command!"

"Martha never asked for that," the Doctor said quietly. "In fact, in my shoes I think she'd have forgiven you too—that was her greatest virtue and failing, that she was generous to a fault. I never did properly appreciate that, when I had it."

Missy gave him a look of freezing scorn. "Oh, bugger your little evangelist, she and I could talk about what your appreciation's worth—you know what I mean and who I'm talking about. I make you field marshal of your own damned army but you'd rather be Little Madam's tea boy scuttling through the weeds on your hands and knees, yes Clara, anything you say Clara, here's the last of my own kind who has any use for me but happy to turn her to a pile of ash on your say-so, in the name of Clara the compassionate the merciful—you tried to kill me! On command! No wonder she hardly notices the other one's snuffed it, such a steadfast tin soldier she's got in you—"

"Oh, no. No. Don't you sit there and lecture me on Clara, and what she does or doesn't feel or think—not exactly your strong suit, _dearest,_ not with anyone." This was the good kind of anger, the marvelously righteous kind that cleared the brain and focused addled senses like peppery food blasting a head cold. Not bored anymore, not in the least. "You do that to someone she loved, just like you did it to me, and what did you expect back from her? Nothing? Believe me, if humans were the abject little helots you think they are you might actually have succeeded, even once, in conquering them—"

"You tried to kill me! On the orders of an _ape!_ Right after you dispatched me back to the twelfth of never to die!" Missy's face was contorted, the ends of her words cut off and spat out like something foul. "Could I ever forgive that? Would you? What is any of that supposed to tell me?"

"No more," said the Doctor, "than that another of your flawless, ingenious, scathingly brilliant ideas backfired in your face. Again. And let's face it, you really should be used to that by now."

Goading, pushing, outright instigating, oh it felt good. He wasn't even going to question how much he was enjoying it. Missy's jaw was clenched, her cheeks tinted brick without any need of paint; she was trembling with rage, she couldn't have hidden it if she'd wanted to. Better and better. Let's see what you've bloody got. Over the barrier of her drawn-up knees their faces were inches apart, mouths close enough to bite deep and draw blood.

"I could kill you," she said. "Just like you claim you could kill me, right now, where you sit—"

"Nothing new." At this proximity he could see the color gather in her skin, recede and fade, with the steady rhythm of a pulse. "Nothing new at all."

"And on top of everything else you throw my one, purely political mistake back in my face, when you've debased yourself with one ape after another after another, one of them perverted enough to almost be one of us but give it all up for you--tell me, Doctor, all this time, should _I_ have been keeping a special little notebook of every time you scratch your arse or break wind or deign to throw me a few crumbs of your attention?" Her voice dropped to a grating murmur. "Well? Would that suit?"

The Doctor gazed at her, at the slope of a cheekbone as its brick red faded to rose and then the faintest pink, the rapid pulse of color diminishing and draining away. "Just how long have you been watching me?" he asked.

"What, you've never read it? Seriously?" She laughed. "No, you wouldn't, you're that good about your pets' funny little notions of privacy—because a cat would just die of shame if you caught it in the sandbox. Talk about a hagiography, let me tell you, every time Saint You the Inviolable let out another holy breath the little pervert scribbled it all down for posterity. Never mind the rest of it, every last sacred hard-on and tickling and spanking and arse-whipping and clone orgy and—"

He seized her wrists, his fingers twisting and tight. " _How long_ have you been watching me."

"If you knew," she replied, quiet and insinuating and with an edge of sharpened steel, "you would be terrified."

He ran his tongue along the back of his teeth, the movement oddly effective in helping him collect himself. "She's dead," he noted, as offhandedly as he might have mentioned a mislaid jumper. "And I loved-- _don't you dare laugh at me!_ "

Was she really startled at this outburst, or was it just more theatrics? Either way she swiftly composed her features, grasping at solemnity. His grip on her wrists tightened that much more.

"I loved her, but I'm not moving heaven, earth or the Tomnaverie stones to try and bring her back. She's gone. Just like Martha and Clara and Polly and Jackie and Ian and all the rest of them will be one day, very soon, sooner than any of them can ever perceive. Their remains, their effects, their writings, their 'funny notions' of what they want kept to themselves then or now, that's all any of them have got, so for God's sake let them keep what little is theirs. Let them lie." He forced Missy's hands palms upward, as though she actually held River's diary in them and he could inveigle it, wrestle it away. "Leave it be."

Missy shook her head, and smiled. The tent walls rippled with another tremor, a faint garlicky reek of phosphorus threading through the air.

"I don't actually blame her, you know," she said. "That last body of yours, by Kasterborous standards you were a bit of a head-turner—and brunet, I like that best. Don't know about you, but I'm off my game fair-haired. Silver...mm, that's passable. Reminds me of the old days." She wrenched her hands free, ignoring how his own wouldn't give way, how his nails scored her skin; her fingers traced the contours of his mouth, barely registering how he flinched from the touch. "Not keen on his voice, though, his or the one before him—honk honk honk, went the sweet insufferably sanctimonious goosy gander. You've started growling now, just a bit. _Much_ better." 

Her lips tilted upward, an approving little grimace. "And such an open face, I like that. You're not so arrogant anymore, not enough to try and hide when you're really angry, or desperate, or afraid—just like you never could when first I met you. It's what I liked best about you, how no matter how hard you tried you never could hide what you wanted, could never pass yourself off as more than what you were. That, I've missed. But it really didn't take me long at all, now did it, to knock you back down a peg or two?" The thought seemed to cheer her, immensely. "You're headed back where you belong, at long last—though still not nearly humbled enough for my taste. But you'll get there. I'll see to it." She tapped one finger hard against the bridge of his nose. "Miles to go before you weep."

The Doctor contemplated her wrist, the back of her hand, the faint red lines his nails had left there. Just like that day in the graveyard, his frustration and fury were collapsing upon themselves, giving way to a helpless resignation.

"Why do you do this," he asked, knowing any answer would be useless. "Why do you behave like this, when it hurts you as much as anyone else. Turning me against you, over and over again, wreaking havoc even you can't control, destroying blameless creatures for no reason whatsoever, like that poor Osgood you mesmerized—" 

"Mesmerized?" She burst into laughter, an outright guffaw. "Mesmerized! Oh, my dear, I didn't even have to bother trying! All it took was listen-ooh-ah-ooh-d'you-wanna-know-a-secret and Little Miss Sucks-To-Your-Ass-Mar was Fimo in my fist—I almost let her live, just to see what a willing and eager bootlicker I could've made of her. And you know I could have, you've seen me do it and without any parlor tricks. Like you said, you were there." She regarded him with malice, nostalgia, an incongruous sort of fondness. "And don't start sniveling about that other one, the keen UNIT gardener, you got her back with frequent-flyer miles and not even a bruise."

"And that makes it all right? That entirely by accident, you didn't manage to destroy another innocent person I—"

"Innocent, listen to yourself, she's up to her neck with a whole passel of spies and soldiers! For a government that once conquered and ruled three-quarters of that rotten little planet, sucking up gold and diamonds and hardwood and rubber and slaves and silk and tea and chocolate through a whole great greedy octopus of straws—but it's always different when it's them, isn't it? Always, always, always." Missy threw her hands ceilingward in exaggerated disgust. "Aren't you meant to detest that sort of thing, Doctor, with your pure hearts and unsullied ethics? Or could you just admit you play favorites and make exceptions and stink of undiluted hypocrisy, just like every other lesser being who's ever lived?"

"Oh, don't even try playing Ace with me, I'll laugh myself sick—you tried to kill Kate solely because she's someone I like and respect, and that's all. The same reason why you despise all my companions, why you devote whole lifetimes to my misery—what's in it for you? Really, seriously, why do you do this? When has it ever paid off? Ever?" Without realizing it he'd recaptured one of her hands, his nails digging into the palm hard enough that she almost flinched herself. "I want to know, I really, truly, _humbly_ if that'll get me an answer want to know. What have you ever gained by making me detest you? It _never works._ Never. You _never_ get what you want, if you even have any idea what you want because God knows, I don't." He released his grasp, again raking an agitated hand back and forth through his hair. "How do you justify any of this, ever?"

Missy mulled over this question, quite thoughtfully from all appearances. Then she shrugged. "Ba-nan-as."

"I don't believe you," he said.

She tilted forward, waggling her shoulders like the hindquarters of a cat poised to strike. "I've been mad for fucking years, darling, absolutely years, I've been over the edge for yonks—"

"Not now, you're not. I mean, insist on it all you like, it's a marvelous excuse, but I simply don't believe you—have you forgotten who you're talking to?" he demanded, as she opened her mouth to protest. "Never mind the _Valiant,_ how many times the past seven, eight, nine centuries have we been at that kind of close quarters—whether we wanted it or not? How many times inside each other's minds, whether we wanted to be stripped bare or not? How many of each other's weaknesses and slip-ups and hesitations and panics and schemes and secrets and genius brainwaves and bog-stupidity have we both been witness to, or shared in, or—" 

He could, he realized suddenly, have gone on like that for quite some time. "God knows I've seen you mad, hopelessly barking mad, and I know what it looks like, and it simply doesn't change very much from one you to the next—and this isn't what it's like. This is you knowing exactly what you're doing every moment you do it, and tossing down a few banana peels just to increase the chaos. The fun. Because what's the fun of _mastering_ anyone, if you can't keep them permanently off their game by playing surprise favorites, making exceptions out of nowhere, being arbitrary beyond all predictability and reason? Watch them flutter, then tear off their wings."

"Doctor, I really do think—"

"I know when you're cruel because you truly can't help it, and when it's simply because you're good at it and you like it. You don't know it, but the misery, when you can't help it, is right there, behind your eyes." She groaned aloud, as if he'd just told a terrible and tasteless joke. He ignored it. "Right there. Lurking. I've learned that the hard way myself, that disguise only takes anyone so far—I know when you're trapped inside yourself, when you really are your own worst enemy, and I know when you're putting on a nice, useful, manipulative, underhanded, absolutely shameless self-serving damnable act."

Missy put a thumbnail to her lips, biting at its edge as though whetting a doll-sized axe. "So, Doctor. You don't even recognize me, _me,_ as one of your own kind, even out of the fobwatch, and I'm meant to believe you can read me that well? Truly? That you just have to look into my poor fogged-over eyes to know whether this time around I'm worthy of your pity, with its price above rubies?" 

She had that look again: a vindictive nanny looming in the nursery doorway, armed with brimming bottles of cod liver and carbolic. Again he ignored it, like the cheap trick that it was. "I never said I understood you. I'll never have a clue why you insist on doing what you do. What I said was that as little as I know you, as little as I understand you, there's a few things about you, just a few, that I know very, very well, and sometimes, I wish I didn't." Because all that was too familiar. Because all that wasn't just the Master's own mind at work. Because he wasn't obliged to keep thinking about all that, just now. "And as for not recognizing you, well, whichever of us you might've turned out to be, I didn't want to know. Too much. Too close. Too...everything. So I pretended." He smiled, acknowledging his own willful foolishness. "I'm still quite good at deluding myself, it seems. Far too good at it. But that doesn't mean I can't feel the truth sitting there waiting, like a, like a stone, or something, a cataract, right there behind my eyes. I know it's there, I know it all along, but still, it leaves me stumbling blind."

He paused, feeling far more words building up inside him but determined, adamant that he would not let them spill, and waited for her answering flood of derision, contempt, cutting malevolence. Strangely, though, the nanny and her purgatives had slipped out the door as quickly as she'd arrived; again she seemed pushed just that much off balance, a mere centimeter or two from her course, but that little bit was more than sufficient. Thick hanks of hair were slipping from her braid, trailing over her neck and the sides of her face; she twitched, tossed her head against their ticklish touch, but when they immediately slipped back down again she seemed not to notice.

"Well," she said, "If you're going to claim you know me as well as that—and that's not me saying you're right—you can't keep pretending I don't know you." 

The loosened neckline of her nightgown had slipped to the side, showing the jutting curve of her collarbone, the spot where it began to curve into the shoulder; she picked at the cloth, as though it were a wound. "And I must admit, Doctor, you've got a point because if anyone's the inveterate madman here, it's you. Wandering around the universe like some hobo hopping the same train a thousand times running, no goal, no destination, no purpose, sticking your fingers in every interstellar pie, pulling out all the plums and calling them your bosom pals and then tossing them back to the pavement to rot—and not that I blame you at all, wanting to get shot of our pestilent _pater_ planet, but such a fuss when you scuppered! Couldn't you even do that with a modicum of subtlety?" She shook her head in motherly reproof. "Now, me, I laughed myself sick over it but I don't mind telling you, some of the Cardinals really were out for your eyes. Why, why did you have to act like such a flibbertigibbet fool?"

 _Because,_ the Doctor thought, having no intention of telling her and knowing she wouldn't stand to hear it, _I fell in love after thinking that would never happen to me again, never in a thousand lifetimes, and if I weren't a fool for love I wouldn't be anything at all. Sorry you asked?_ Because that particular memory never slept in his mind but was a perpetual point of wakefulness, blazing and pulsating like a strobe: the moment when, for reasons he could no longer remember, he'd broken into the Relative Dimensions Obsolescence Unit for the dozenth time on yet another spare-parts scavenge, he'd wandered down a long-forgotten corridor and he'd seen her, _her,_ rust-caked and dust-clogged and abandoned as if she didn't even _matter,_ and there he stood, helpless to do anything but stare, his mouth dry and his hands gone to ice and his throat constricted with desire. Because every waking moment, after that, had been scheming to be with her, drowning in her proximity, enduring the irrational but unceasing terror that any night, he might go to see her but find only empty space where she was meant to stand; because every sleeping moment had been her, been him, chasing each other everywhere, for all time, through the same, eternally unspooling dream. _Why? Because I had to. I_ had _to. I will always have to. Not, more's the pity, that you'd ever understand how something like that feels._

"It's complicated," he said.

"Yes, well, most things are, when you're three planks thick." Missy's hair was now only the simulacrum of a braid, the clasp still valiantly hanging on but its weight of plait now merely half what it had been. "Always dead certain you're the rightest of the right, always, always, always dead wrong—and then actually bragging about your idiocy, to the entire world! Well, all right, to me, a talking lemur and all her robot cousins but still, how can you be so shameless?"

Now he really did burst out laughing. "You think I'm shameless? You! Me!" 

"I'm serious, love! Does it ever bother you at all, even the slightest bit, that you're so utterly, risibly stupid, or that every scheme and plan you manage to scratch up is even more so? I mean, when you're got a baboon pit for your brain trust...I don't even know what to say." Through the heap of blankets she patted his knee; or rather, as he moved his leg just in time, the space where his knee had rested. "I suppose I should just pity you."

"It'll be self-pity," he replied, not the least insulted. "Because I'm sorry, but my stupid plans will never be as stupid as your stupid, stupid plans, not in a million—"

"I," she said, eyes flashing, "unlike some, am a rational, clear-sighted thinker."

"Hang on, weren't you bananas flambé not ten minutes ago?"

"And I admit they haven't all come quite as quickly to fruition as I'd like—yet—but my plans are not stupid."

"Bananas flambé, now that'd be lovely. A bit of rum, some orange juice—have you got any in that alligator bag of yours? I know I've got a recipe, stuck somewhere in my old _Jane's Spacecraft of the Universe--_ "

"If you keep this up I'll have the oscillator build another radio telescope, just to throw you off it all over again. My plans are intricate and elegant and so laughably beyond anything you could ever think of, they are _not the least bit stupid—_ "

"Chairs!" He tossed another pillow off the bed, disdainfully, as if it had murmured fatal folly into Missy's ears. "Carnivorous _chairs!_ What the hell ever made you think that was going to work? Who even looks at a chair and thinks, yeah, great, that! All I need is another faux-fur sectional and this puny planet's mine! And those ghastly plastic flowers, and all that mucking about in Atlantis and prancing around a vestry in a dog collar, and humanity really should never forgive you for inventing _Britain's Got Talent_ —" 

" _Make a Star,_ " Missy corrected him, a bit haughtily. "And even I have my less inspired moments, I admit it."

"And that time you managed to shrink yourself by accident—"

_"All right, then!"_

"And I'm the idiot here? Me?" His expression softened. "Well, I am, I said it and it's so, and I really wasn't sure, I really didn't know. Or I was afraid to know, terribly afraid of _knowing_ one way or another, and so I kept trying to pretend, even when it was exhausting. Even when it hurt others, without my meaning to hurt them." He sighed. "But now, whatever else happens, it's the end of all that, and it's such a relief. Truly it is. And whatever else you do, and whatever else you've done...I owe you so much." 

Even before he'd opened his mouth she'd been gearing up for some cutting, dismissive reply, he could see it; her cheeks had pinked up again, from anticipation rather than anger, and she clutched at the bedsheets as if about to fling them at his face. Now, though, she sat back, the set of her mouth gone from arch and coy to thoughtful. "I don't understand," she said.

"Oh, come on, Ms. Intricate Elegance, try and keep up—weren't you listening? Back in the graveyard?" He grabbed his screwdriver, shooting another impatient blast of energy at the lantern when it again began to sputter. "No, I suppose you weren't, not really, you were too busy trying to work out where it all went wrong. Again. I told you. You did it, all over again, just like that day at the Academy. You schemed and stole and sacrileged and called it a gift, you offered me as much awful might and power as I could possibly stand but this time, at least, you had the smattering of decency to let _me_ choose. Just this once, you left that in my hands. And I was tempted, oh, just for a split second, a breath, I was so miserably tempted." 

The screwdriver dangled from his fingers, half-forgotten, all his attention concentrated on that day, on that wide-awake memory, on her. "But I didn't. Suddenly, when I didn't have the option of pretending anymore, when I had to choose one or the other, I knew exactly what I would choose. I knew who I was, and I knew what that person would do, and I could do it in my next breath without any second thoughts—and before this, I hadn't known. I hadn't been at all sure for three lifetimes, four, or more, I swear to you I've lost count, and without all those ape friends you detest so much I don't know if I'd even be—so, yes. I'm not good, I'm not bad, I'm not anything but a stupid fool wandering around the universal kitchen sticking my fingers in every pie and thank you, thank you so much for making me remember that. Finally. At long last. And if by some mad, very stupid chance that really was my birthday, I'm afraid you may have accidentally given me one of the best I've ever had."

He smiled at her again, a genuine, warm smile of genuine, profound gratitude. _Well? Out with it, Master, Mistress, Missy, Milady, Magistra, Maestra, whatever best suits you now, whatever you're about to say to try and cut me down I can take it, I can take anything now. Just try me._ She didn't try him. She looked not just off balance but unmoored, surprise and confusion and something that might even have been embarrassment suffusing the planes and angles of her new face, blunting the pleasingly sharp cheekbones and chin, weighing down the already heavy lids. Well, then? Well?

She didn't say anything. Her chin lowered, her eyes dropped. She studied the duvet very carefully, as if determined to memorize its deep wash of blue.

He reached down beside the bed, letting go of the screwdriver and picking up the small, weighty object that, in the several little earthquakes of the past hours, had shot missile-like from his jacket; he clicked it open, holding it out before her. She seemed tentative at first, as if when she reached for it he might snatch it away. Then she took a jelly baby, luminous green, and bit it in half, sniffing at the headless, armless sweet as she slowly chewed and swallowed.

"Vegetarian," she noted, with an air of distaste. "How very conscientious."

"They taste better."

"No, they don't, dear. They really don't. Grape?" She took another with a delicate swipe of fingertips, like a kingfisher snapping up a water beetle. "No. Blackcurrant. Marginally better."

He took a raspberry baby. They both ate in silence. A strawberry, a lemon, several oranges and limes vanished between them in short order, then the Doctor reached behind him and let the cigarette case drop back to the floor. 

"Funny, isn't it," Missy said, more to herself than him.

"What is?"

She shrugged. "All the gin joints in all the cities on all the planets in all the Kasterborous, and you come blundering straight into mine. Why were you so far away from the children's home anyway, trampling my father's fields, scaring the rabbits silly, making an Arcadian spectacle of yourself? Well, I mean, I know _why_ , because they were a marvelous spot for you to throw yourself on your face and blubber without anyone finding you. Until I found you." She stretched her legs out beneath the sheets, her toes making small hillocks in the duvet's wash of blue. "I thought an animal or something had got wounded, I was going to smash in its skull and put it out of its misery. Perhaps I should've anyway." She glanced at him. "Perhaps I still shall."

He remembered that day very well. Sometimes most unwillingly. "You laughed at me," he noted. 

"And rightly so, my dear, and even then you couldn't half manage to pull your socks up. What a spectacle! No shame, even then. None."

"Would you have wanted to be my friend," he asked, "if I'd been stoic and manly and 'pulled my socks up'?" 

She seemed surprised at the question. "Of course not. It's like I told you, the most charming thing about you is that no matter how you try, no matter how far you run, you can never, in the end, hide anything from me."

He considered this. "You'd be surprised," he said. "In fact, you might even be in for a few very nasty shocks."

"Perhaps so." The blue-washed hillocks shifted, dipped, rose again as she crossed her ankles. "But you know, that sort of thing's got its own sort of charm." She met his gaze again. "Doesn't it."

Through the weave of the tent's seemingly impenetrable cloth came the scents of nitrification, alkynes, a faint pungent odor like seawater. The air was charged all around them, between them. Slowly, without forethought, they had come closer together beneath the bedclothes; mere inches closer, more than enough space still between them to allow one or the other to draw away with ease. She didn't move forward. He didn't pull back.

"If you say so," he said.

The slight tilt of her chin threw one cheekbone into especially sharp relief, its long slope paralleling those of nose and jaw with such symmetry it really might have been sculpted that way. He imagined clay, a flesh-cool plasticine stuff, his own fingers stretching and smoothing it just so; molding that curve of the shoulder, rolling it into ropes between his palms and then painstakingly shaping, with fingertips, each escaped lock of hair one by one. His fingers twitched again, their little movements nearly imperceptible.

"Erysich," she said. The word seemed pulled from her, painfully, like a tooth from a swollen jaw. "Would you tell?"

"I told you that I wouldn't."

"But would you."

Her eyes had gone darker; not with anger, but with unfeigned fear. He studied her, even more closely. He thought it over, quite seriously, for a good long time. 

"You've got Gallifrey," he said. "I've got that. Whether either of us likes it, or not."

 _Fear makes companions of us all._ Who had first said that to him, so long ago? Which species' cherished proverb was it, or had he read it somewhere? He couldn't remember. Not anymore.

Their knees touched beneath the thick, disheveled layers of blankets, the folds of her nightdress brushing against his shins. He could feel her breath against his face, hear how it had quickened. What should he feel at that? Triumph, scorn, indifference, revulsion, the old here-we-go-'round-the-Cadonflood-reeds weariness? It didn't matter what he should feel, not just now, because what he did feel was a very calm, strangely reticent, unmistakable excitement. Of course she could sense it, of course he couldn't hide it from her for trying. But he wasn't trying. And she wasn't laughing. Not at all. Her head bent forward and when her hair fell with it, hanging heavy against his own cheek, he didn't brush it away.

"I need my friend back," she said, very quietly.

"And as I have been telling you and telling you for centuries on end, this is the worst possible way to go about it."

"And what's the right way?" She lowered her head just a little further, her forehead nearly touching his shoulder, but then, just as swiftly, they were back face to face. He might almost have thought she was being careful, purposely careful. "Throwing myself on one of your periodic spasms of mercy, swearing that I'll never, never, never do it again, getting to be your 'responsibility' you drag along on all your useless freight-hops all around—"

"Any time," he said. "Any time at all."

"Until this year's model pet decides I needs killin'. Right?"

Not a good man, not a bad man, but a bloody stubborn one, this time out in particular; that, he needed no one to tell him. Goading. Balking. Digging in his heels, in the face of all reason and common sense. "Any time. At all."

She shook her head. Almost sadly, but not quite. "Not on your terms. Never. Ever."

There were some things he could always rely upon, at least.

He put a hand out, pushed a few strands of hair behind her ear. His fingertips slid along one cheekbone, touched the edge of her mouth. She shivered. 

"I still have my grievances," she said.

"So all that was just the overture then, was it?"

"I'm quite serious." She shifted very slightly closer. "I mean, for one thing, you've certainly never gone to hell and back for _me_."

"And that," he said, "is the biggest, most shameless, most egregious lie I think you've ever told."

Their foreheads were touching. He could feel it just beneath the surface, the slow steady throb at her temple, and his own: the extratemporal lobe, that which human brains had never possessed but they must've still had an inkling existed in some distant-cousin species, some far advanced ancestor somewhere in the universe, what with all their only half-nonsensical talk of pineal glands and third eyes. The flesh right there was warmer, not warm like human skin but like a spot, in the middle of a January lake, where sunlight had just begun to made headway against the ice. She put arms around him, or began to, but he stopped her.

"I'm not the hugging sort," he said. "Not anymore."

"Just like the old days," she mused. "Better and better."

She sat back, once more folding her hands in her lap; not with mockery this time, but with a meditative patience. 

"Fiver," she said.

He blinked. "What?"

"That book. Fiver. He's my favorite. He sees right through them all. Even after they've scampered off, moved house, gone across the river and dug their fancy new holes in the ground, he knows in the end they're all still doomed." She gave him a waspish glance. "You, you're Dandelion. A ridiculous, longwinded story for every occasion and so very, very good at running away."

"What else have you read?" he demanded. "If you're really haunting lending libraries for every book I ever mentioned in passing—"

" _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,_ " she said. "Rubbish." Indignant, he opened his mouth to protest and she barreled forward. " _Wind in the Willows,_ rubbish. _Trout Fishing in America,_ rubbish. The _Mahabharata, Decamerone_ and _Dao De Jing,_ rubbish. _Orlando,_ rubbish. _Notre Dame des Fleurs,_ sentimental rubbish. _Tartuffe,_ infantile rubbish. All those bloody Agatha Christies, nauseating rubbish—"

"I'm bored. What did you like? Anything?"

"All of them," she said, as if this should have been quite obvious.

"You just said—"

"You're a bit sentimental, infantile and rubbish too, dear, it's what you're made of. I never said that was a demerit." 

He studied her hands, his own, lying against the covers, their fingers close enough to touch but keeping their distance and biding their time. Then, after long hesitation, he looked up. In her face he saw a rueful, unwilling, but undisguised affection.

"You saved me," she said. Her voice could be soft, even melodious, when she wanted it to be. "Don't deny it."

"I saved Gallifrey."

"You saved me. Many times. You pleaded with me to return to you. You begged me to regenerate. You wept over my body and didn't give a damn who saw it." Her words rose and fell and rose again, the cadence of a preacher hoarse and weary after a four-day tent revival, but the spirit hadn't fled. "Don't pretend that didn't happen. Don't pretend that was all a dream, or a stratagem, or some sort of shared insanity—"

"Sometimes," he said, "I think if we didn't have shared insanity, we wouldn't have much at all." 

She didn't answer.

Once, when they were still boys but soon not to be any longer, they'd hiked further than they ever had before, crossing the northernmost southern drylands, reaching the ruins of Old Harbour and the high, verdant banks of the Cadonflood. The Master had worked out the route but then strayed satisfyingly far off the path, giving Erysich a wide berth without even a murmur, and the Doctor would've judged it a marvelous day if only all the Master's talk, all of it, endless kilometers' worth, hadn't been about the bloody Time Academy. _Well, you'll never see me there,_ the Doctor finally said, weary of the mere thought of the place. Why did his first and only friend yearn for all their travels and rambles, the free life, to be over forever? The old gloom had descended on him, despite the afternoon's grass-scented breeze and plentiful sun. _They'd never take me, you only think I'm an idiot but they're convinced of it. I'm not even meant to take the entrance exam. They want me for a soldier._

The Master had listened, and swatted at a little cloud of gnats, and said nothing. That's that, then, the Doctor thought, with a flash of bitterness, but he too said nothing. Then, days or maybe weeks later, the Master approached him, silently pressed something into his palm and stalked away at double speed, vanishing before the Doctor himself could say a word. The thing was the shape and weight of a broad river stone, plain pewter with exquisitely engraved edgework and the former owner's initials—not the Master's—scratched illegible: It was a student's work-light, the kind you pressed to your temple for a few moments and then, thus neurally imprinted, it emitted only as much illumination as you required, extinguished itself the instant you desired. Obviously stolen, and frankly that made the Doctor like it that much more. He wasn't half the idiot to let anyone at the home see he had it but in the dark, after everyone else was asleep, he finally had the bit of light he'd so desperately wanted as a child. Then, one night, he'd been idly toying with the decorated border, just for the pleasure of touching it, when something inside the thing clicked, and moved.

At first he thought he'd broken it, but the light didn't go out. Pure curiosity drove him then, and he pressed and pushed, tapped and twisted, growing more intrigued and impatient as he sensed _something_ coiled inside the mechanism trying to assert itself, stretch out, spring to life. Hours went by, the sky outside had gone from black to ashen gray, when he finally touched just the right engraving at just the right angle, turned it in his grasp with just the right amount of force. The flat light-stone split open and upwards into a full-bloom pewter flower, its pistil a cup cradling something in its depths, and what it hid was a holographic scroll, covered on all sides—not in the Master's handwriting—with equations, cryptoglyphs, lists, dates, temporal factorials, Highest Gallifreyan conjugations. Not just a work-light, then, but a crib-sheet. A lifeline. Everything and anything the Academy might demand a potential student demonstrate they know, there for the memorization, in the Doctor's hands...and there it might just as easily have stayed, unfound, unguessed at, for decades, centuries, of conscripted tours of duty, if not for a single, accidental touch. 

_You know the best part about knowing? Not telling you._

_When you do figure it out...and even fool that you are, you will._

Missy pulled the clasp from her hair, tossing it carelessly onto the sheets. 

"You were good to me," the Doctor said. "Or at least, every now and then, you tried to be. Once."

"You forgave me everything," she said. "Once."

He raised his hand. His fingers hovered in midair, touching nothing, just as they'd been after she'd put them to her hearts, her breast, making him so fearful to accept what the first touch of his hand had told him that he'd thrust the very idea from his mind, instantly, instinctively, wandering 3W's ghastly hallways in a self-imposed fog. Now, though, it seemed to him that his head, his thoughts had rarely been so clear. 

"The mere sight of me fills you with disgust," Missy reminded him. "Righteous, unwavering, visceral disgust. Don't you remember?"

"You want only to destroy me," he reminded her. "To wreak your revenge on me, torment me, break me, and then kill me. And nothing more."

He touched her face. With contemplative languor he caressed her temple, his fingers sliding to where the cheekbone met the jaw; his thumb rubbed her earlobe, savoring the natural coolness of Gallifreyan skin, the faint flush of arousal blooming beneath his touch. He returned to the temple, pressing his thumb against it as though leaving a print in clay, and then let his fingertips trace an anatomical pathway, the track of the extratemporal neurons and their long, flowering dendrites: down the side of her face, over the fleshy spot just beneath her ear, along the column of her throat and then, just there, the nape of the neck. The nape, that celebrated spot where the axons all clustered together in astonishing, exquisitely sensitive proliferation before branching back out to circle the throat, course through the collarbone, depart for points far below and beyond. Did she care or even remember what it had meant, in certain silent, _sub rosa_ Gallifreyan communications, to put your hair up high enough to expose the back of your neck, to wear collars low enough that a particular soul might see it? Did she know or even care that he remembered, very well? 

He lifted his hand again for a moment, pulling the last strands of thick, soft hair free of the braid's remnant twists. As it fell free, he pushed it aside to cradle his palm around the back of her neck; he pressed his lips to where the nightgown's neckline had slid, that exposed juncture of collarbone and shoulder. Female Gallifreyans—all the anatomy books informed one—possessed no Islets of Braxbordamos, that sensory archipelago on the right-side collarbone whose manipulation could inspire a very particular pleasure (or, as he'd learned all too well in more than one regeneration, pain so intense it was a mercy to black out), but they had more than enough extra dendrites, scattered gem-like all over nape and throat, to make that seem a paltry loss. He rubbed gently, slowly, then let his fingers curl and dig in just a little bit, just below the hairline, and dragged them down toward the knob of the spine. Then again. His teeth grazed, but did not bite the collarbone's thin skin. Her chin tilted up, seemingly of its own will, and her breath became sharp and shallow as her eyes began to close. She still hadn't touched him. He was left free to do just as he liked.

He trailed his fingertips around her throat, a meandering pathway like a stray water droplet's, and ran them beneath her chin, down to where the Adam's apple had gone missing, along the minute curve of the clavicle and back up to the chin once more. She knelt on the bedsheets, palms pressed flat against her thighs, swaying in the slightest, unwitting counterrhythm to his hand. The lantern light against her nightgown rendered it translucent, revealed the silhouette of nakedness beneath; as he lowered his lips back to her neck he could see the pale curve and dark tip of one breast beyond the unbuttoned collar, a glimpse of rounded belly beneath it. Both his hands were at work now, from scalp to scapulae, their movements growing more forceful and urgent as she rested her chin atop his head—pressing down, as if to anchor him there—and sighed.

"Your humans—" she began.

"Dear God, not _now._ "

"No, I only meant—" He dragged his nails down the length of her spine, and her back arced almost painfully in response. "—isn't it funny, the way they talk about 'necking,' and they have no idea what the word really means?"

Again he felt the sharpness of her chin, then the softness of her cheek against his hair. This wasn't his first body where casual touch, however affectionate, felt like a skin-twitching, buzzing housefly intrusion—it cropped up every few regenerations, though some hid it better than others, and in his youth he'd shrugged off the Master's companionable or proprietary arm across his shoulders too many times to count—but always, in all such bodies, there were also the startling and wholly unpredictable neck-bowings, knee-bucklings, points of no return. Her head against his, the dark locks of hair brushing his face and raised arm, even her angled shoulder unwittingly pressing at his chest were now a soothing thing, a welcome thing, something to taste and savor and then quietly demand more, and still more. Her skin smelled like skin was supposed to smell, a grassy, honeyed acridity no other species ever emitted. He breathed in, his nostrils filling with the scent, and as the color rushed all at once into her face and her hands balled into fists with the effort of keeping still, his restrained, distantly observed excitement seemed to sidle up alongside him, melt into his own flesh and bones, demand things of him he was suddenly eager, so eager, to provide.

"What really is funny," he said, his voice a low, congested murmur, "is that doing this to oneself never feels even half as good."

His mouth found her breast, latching on through the thin, slightly rough, bitter-tasting white cloth. His teeth closed, again not quite biting. 

"Not even a fraction as good," she agreed, breathless.

"Lie back."

She shook her head and displayed her empty fingers, waggling them a little, before pressing them firmly back down against the duvet. "Obeying _one_ of your silly behests," she whispered, "is more than enough."

"Lie back."

"Make me."

All his neck, his collarbone were buzzing, goosefleshed, spots of true heat surging and subsiding in fast, uneven pulsations and needing the relief of cool fingers, a patient mouth. He seized her shoulders, but instead of shoving her backward he slid one hand down inside the nightdress, cupped her breast, pinched down hard on the nipple until she threw her head back, moaning a little, then louder as he licked and kissed the curve of her throat. Without raising his head he groped for a handful of nightdress cloth, started pulling the hem up past her knees, but she slithered from his grasp and pulled it back down, panting, grinning.

"Doctor," she pled, from beneath lowered lashes, "do leave a poor girl her modesty."

She was biting her lips, the lower first, then the upper, as if trying to redden them. Her neckline had slipped farther, more buttons undone, one breast nearly revealed. "I can see you anyway," he said. "The lantern light, white cloth, I can see right through it."

"Then be satisfied with that."

His breath was audible. Perhaps only to his own ears. "Come here, then."

"Why?"

"Come _here._ "

"You can just as well continue from where you are—"

"Come here, and—" Why was it, why should it be so hard to ask? He'd begged for so much more, in the past. Begged for it to stop. Begged for it to never stop. "—use your hands."

Her brows flitted up, hearing this, then lowered into gentle, deeply amused reproof. "Oh, no, love, no no no—you're far too fragile for that sort of thing now. Couldn't bear it. Wouldn't like to break you in pieces, now would I."

He drew in another breath, knowing she could hear it. He was kneeling on the sheets as she knelt, his arms at his sides, clutching his own nightshirt hem not to pull it off, but simply to keep his fingers still. " _Come here,_ and use your mouth. Your hands."

She tilted her head, smiling, eyes running over his body. As if the light weren't also stripping him in silhouette. As if it were any great secret he was hard. "Don't give me orders, Doctor. I cannot imagine anything that suits you less, and I don't think you can either. Just don't."

He closed his eyes for a moment. Then opened them, gazed at her straight on, because somehow he knew she'd insist on that. 

"Please touch me," he said.

She didn't laugh, or even smile. Her arms obliterated the space between them and he made a loud shuddering sound as soft full lips, sharp unforgiving teeth, the wet hungry track of her tongue overwhelmed his temples, his throat, his chest where she'd tugged the nightshirt's lacings loose; even his hands she held to her cheek, her mouth and kissed them with genuine, possessive fervor, as if in gratitude for all they'd done to her. Slowly, wonderfully slowly, she licked at the whorl of his ear while he cupped her buttocks in his palms—again through the cloth, not lifting it, savoring the small torment of her body pressed up tight against his but still so very far removed. She hooked her nails into his scalp and dragged them slow and deep down the side of his neck, letting out a smothered laugh as that made him thrust his hips hard against her, and then she was digging straight into that hideously sensitive constellation on his collarbone and scorching sparks of pain flew down to his rib cage, shot up the back of his skull. He cried out, involuntarily, and she jerked back as swiftly as if it'd been he who hurt her. There was a sudden fine mist of sweat on his forehead, and honest contrition in her eyes.

"Careful," she muttered, an admonition to herself. _"Careful."_ Her fingers skimmed the flesh around those overheated, nervous islands, resting still here and there, a cool damp cloth against the burn; he exhaled, the pain retreating as swiftly as it had attacked, and Missy sponged at his face, little pats with her nightgown sleeve. Her lips tapped his forehead, too lightly for a proper kiss. "Better?" she asked.

"Yes. Better. Yes."

He had hold of her wrist, as if fearful she would pull her hands altogether away. Instead she rubbed his neck and his half-bared chest, scrupulously skirting that part she'd so hurt. Her gaze, though, never left it. "Hypersensitized synapses, it happens. I could do something with that," she suggested, quite casually, a fingertip tracing lines well above those mottled, reddened spots of skin. "Something you'd like. Promise." Her eyes, unblinkingly intense in examination, went just a shade darker. "After you get through screaming."

She had the look of a child, the sort of prim proper little girl his own daughters and granddaughter couldn't have been if you paid them, decorously pleading for a special treat. And, at the very same time, that of the nanny on the threshold, with her carbolic and hard-backed hairbrush and grim, yet wholly right-minded determination to restore order once and for all. Something coiled up deep inside him stretched out, unfurled, luxuriated in its newfound space and light.

"Later," he said. Hardly above a whisper.

She nodded, and ran fingers this way and that through his hair. Careful not to pull. He snaked his hand back inside her nightdress, stroking her breasts, undoing more of the tiny, close, innumerable pearl buttons, one by one, not moving to the next until its predecessor was entirely undone.

"You really will scream," she said. Her free hand undid a few more buttons, fumbling in her haste; she pushed his head down, guiding his mouth as the opened gown fell from her shoulders, down her arms. "Just for my own safety, mind"—obediently he put his tongue to her nipple, and her voice skittered upward—"I might even have to tie you down."

Her breasts were rounded and full, the nipples long stiffened points of berry brown; as he sucked and licked and bit at one he groped for the other, squeezed it in a gentle but unyielding hold. Her fingers rubbed at his nape, massaged all down his back and back up again, giving and generous simply—as always, as expected—from some passing whim, and he switched around his mouth and hand as long, shivering contractions gripped the muscles of his thighs, buttocks, shoulders, arms. "Restraints, again," he muttered, his words vibrating against the cushion of her skin. "You never get tired of that?"

She laughed, ardor cut with greed. "I know _you_ don't."

He put his lips between her breasts, licked a trail along an exposed wedge of abdomen, but when he dipped his head lower she pushed him away. Breasts bare, arse resting on her heels, knees spread wide, back and shoulders perfectly poised and straight, she presented a portrait of ladylike obscenity that made him swallow around a dry throat and reach out again to strip her of that half-undone nightgown, knowing she'd refuse him this time too. A flush came and went against her skin; she was shivering like he shivered as she slipped her hand beneath his nightshirt, curled fingers just right, just tight enough, around his cock. A fingertip stroked him between cock and balls, at the exact right spot, and he clenched his teeth to stifle a groan. She stroked a little faster.

"Not that you're not lovely as you are," she said, fingers holding him just a little tighter, "but if we could ever manage to both be women at the same time, the fun we could have together—there, see, typical man," she laughed again, as his cock twitched against her palm. "That'd be worth a temporary cease-fire, wouldn't it?"

"I thought—ahh—the regeneration before this one, as it was happening, I thought I'd be female. For a split second." Her fingers drew up and down, maddeningly gentle, and his eyes began to close. "And my fifth body, I was actually shocked I wasn't a woman, I'd been convinced. I don't know why. I'm long—oh, harder—overdue."

"Harder, _please._ " Her lips brushed his cheek. "Total surprise to me, when it happened. But one adjusts. In fact, one realizes what one's been missing all along."

Her mouth slid onto his and he forced her lips open, no asking please, not even a fleeting impulse to ask— _she_ hadn't, she never would—and savored everything that first farcical kiss hadn't offered, the privacy of the embrace and the freedom never to pull away and the slowness that let him savor the honeyed, acrid taste of it, the sound of her sighing into his mouth. They broke the kiss, resumed it, made each round last as long as they could a half-dozen times or countless more, it felt like it'd been centuries and it had been, it truly had. They were wrapped tight around each other, fingers sunk deep into each other's hair, the tremors in their arms little electrical jolts pricking feverishly at their flesh. Suddenly—and yet not, for by some unbidden instinct they both knew it was the moment—they drew apart, caught their breath, stared at themselves reflected back from each other's eyes. Missy tilted her chin up, tensing. The Doctor raised his hand, studied the high part of her cheekbone where the proper nerve endings clustered and flowed, took aim and slapped her full force across the face. 

She gasped, her head snapped back and as sensation shot down those nerves and through her body she moaned out loud, gritted her teeth against it and slapped him back: left, right, a double whipcrack that hurt almost as much as the blow to his collarbone but he didn't want her to stop, not this time, not now. The heated rush of pain at the surface, the answering surge of pleasure everywhere else was dizzying, exhilarating, making his muscles tremble and his balls fill with a heavy ache and so give it again, take it again, they were both so skilled at leaving no marks and there'd be nothing to explain to anyone, no one but them to know. She struck him again, as if she'd read his thoughts, and surely there on his face she had. And again. And again.

He rocked his head back, panting, biting the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood, and the sound that flew from her when he hit her back would've scared him, sent him running to the aid of anyone else, but this wasn't anyone else and she paid him back with interest, again, and then again. Her striking fingers, briefly at rest, flexed at her side; her other hand was a clenched fist, pressed hard to the nightdress cloth between her legs. His palm stung and hurt as much as his cheeks, his jaw. He raised it again and she seized his wrist, eased her body back against his with shocking gentleness and found his mouth once more, kissed him long and deep. She had a brief tussle with the nightdress, pulling it over her head and tossing it aside in a crumpled heap, then thrust fingers into his mouth and he sucked on them, savoring each one in turn, before she slid them away, took up his hand and pressed it to where her fist had been. His fingers slid inside her and she twisted her hips this way and that as he pushed them upward, farther in.

"You're drenched," he gasped, as if this were some great surprise.

"Something you like," she said, kissing clumsily at his ear, the smarting side of his face. "I seem to recall reading somewhere."

That barb didn't sting, even come close to finding the mark; he was far too preoccupied turning his fingers that way and this, curving them at just the right angle that her muscles gripped him tight and she kissed him with unrestrained fervor, too many times to count. His thumb found her clitoris and quite deliberately rubbed too slow, too gently, until she raked her nails in frustration against the side of his neck and he started, smothered a laugh, caressed with enough concentrated exertion to make her wince with pained, unhidden need. His fingers were terribly restless. They nipped and pinched, softly and then cruelly rough, at her fragile inner folds, stroked their silken skin like something rare and precious. He took her outer lips and thus all her cunt in a grip that bore down hard and then harder, fingertips squeezing, vise-hand moving back and forth in place; she almost whimpered at the sensation, nails now digging of their own volition into his back, his mind full of the most ridiculous yet most perfectly suited thoughts of overripe fruit, skin-bruised, sweet and oozing juice. 

He released his hold and licked at the pungent salt slicking his whole hand, sucked at his sleeve cuff where it too had gone damp. She looked so eager to hit him again and yet, at the same moment, soft with affection, almost abashedly pleased at his thirst. Her wetness had trickled down her thighs, dripped onto the sheets beneath them. Without warning she grabbed his shoulders, threw him off balance and after the smallest of struggles shoved his face flat against the mattress, gagging him on a mouthful of cloth smelling of her, soaked from her. He bit down on it eagerly, rubbed his cheek against it as though it were her body, then as she set him free his hands circled her hips and he put his tongue to the source. The taste of it, undiluted, against the taste of her skin made him moan and her shaking, encouraging hand ran soothingly over his hair; she was lying back now, finally, legs draped over his shoulders, heels rubbing against his flanks and letting out a rhythmic, wordless murmur of contentment.

"Poor dear," she said, her old singsong stripped of all its malice, "who knew, starving all this time and insisting he's not hungry—"

"Do you want more damned begging?" His voice was choked and near shouting as a sudden anger shot through him, the anger and embarrassment of being muffled there against her and never wanting to raise his head and so close, so agonizingly close, so convinced there would be no final release. "Is that what—"

"No no no, it's all right now, come here. Come here." He wouldn't move. "Please? Please—"

"Just _leave me to it,_ if that's what—"

"Just like the old days, love, I like that, I always knew you were really gagging for it when you got angry. Poor thing. All this time." He couldn't tell anymore if she were mocking him or not and he didn't care, the quiet tenor of the words was drawing him in and if it were a trick, all of it, he didn't care. "Doctor. Please?"

He knelt between her legs and clutched at her breasts, her buttocks, pushed her thighs farther apart, and mockery was nowhere to be found in her face, in her own trembling, almost propitiating touch as her limbs encircled his. She'd been tormenting herself every bit as much as him and he was glad, she deserved it, so did he just for being here, but he couldn't and wouldn't imagine himself anywhere else, his hearts were galloping and hers too against his chest and God help anyone who tried to interfere, anyone at all. As he thrust into her—still gloriously drenched, as wet as he was hard—her teeth sank into his shoulder and she mumbled something that might have been _finally, please, yes,_ might have been some garbled instruction but he wasn't listening; he said something aloud in turn that he barely even heard but it made her sigh into his ear and fervently whisper _I do too, I do too._ Her face looked like it had for just a few fleeting seconds that day in the graveyard, the same soft, open, almost sorrowful affection she'd had watching him lick her traces away and why couldn't that last, why couldn't this be—he thrust harder, finding a slow but urgent rhythm that best suited them both, and she pressed her cheek flush against his, wrapped her legs tighter around his waist.

"May I—ooh—" She bit, so delicately, at his ear, her breath rapid. "—say something silly?"

"Why shouldn't you," he mumbled, his face buried in her hair.

"You fit perfectly." She wriggled beneath him, adjusting her hips to better angle herself against him. "But then, you nearly always do."

 _You,_ the Doctor thought, as he began moving faster, _sometimes you don't. And that can be a bit perfect too._ Her nails dug into his arse, his into the sides of her neck. He bit down again at his cheek, on the side already gnawed nearly raw; she arched her back, shifted her leg just right to make both of them groan, clawed a hand at the sheets as he threaded his fingers in her hair, pulled without caring if it hurt. Nor did she. He was gazing straight down into her eyes, her hair twined around his hands, and even as her encircling legs kept him desperately close she kept trying to free her head of his grasp, to get her own hands up to his face. He let go of her but pulled his own head away, rose up on his elbows and then higher, bracing himself on his palms, to try and elude this particular touch. She was desire satisfied and thwarted, panting and moaning at his thrusts but distracted from herself by this petty deprivation, this one bewildering refusal; when she reached for him again and he actually slapped her hand down, she ground her teeth in frustrated fury, tried to rise up closer to him but immediately, and without remorse, he pushed her back in place.

"Christ, what are you waiting for," she muttered, disbelief with an edge of pleading. "You can feel it too, you can feel—"

"Not this time." He ran a thumb along her hairline, as if taunting her on purpose, and when that made her hiss and raise her striking hand anew he grabbed both her wrists, pinned them above her head. "You should've—" His breath was turning ragged, uneven. "—tied me up right away, if you wanted that."

"I don't believe you." She pulled hard at his grasp, let slip a flash of excitement that she couldn't free herself, shook her head in outraged astonishment. "I don't believe—don't you trust me not to—"

"No!" he gasped, thrashing harder. "Why would I ever—trust you—let loose inside my mind? You'd—" His eyes closed hard and he forced them open again, dangerous not to keep an eye on her now, so lethally tempting to close them anyway and let her have anything she wanted, do to him whatever she liked. "—shred my nerves like a rat in the wiring, you'd—"

"D'you want me to beg? Is that it?" Her legs kicked out against his body, at the air, as if that could somehow loosen his hold on her arms. "Because I will, I'll say whatever you like if that's—"

"I can't trust a word you say. You know—" She moaned again, and he was back down on his elbows, kissing her on the forehead. "—I can't." 

"Even better." His hands were relaxing anyway, his palms pressing to hers, their fingers curling together against the sheets. "You love a bad girl."

"It's a trick." Their knotted hands were restless, unclasping to caress and then urgently, almost fearfully drawing back together. "Another lie, all you ever do is—"

_"Please."_

A choked whisper, almost a sob, and her face looked again like it had for just one vanishing second, back in the graveyard: yearning, beseeching, honestly uncaring if they two went together to Gallifrey (another lie, Gallifrey, another and another) just so he could throw her in a lightless cell and he didn't care anymore, he was already inside her, they were already inside each other (a perfect fit or terrible, it didn't matter, he lied to himself if he pretended it was anything but the _being_ there that mattered). He shouldn't even be here and there was no one but them to know, he was free to do just as he liked, free if he wanted it to throw himself away. His hands slid from hers and traveled up her jawline, past her cheekbones, resting in wait at the only true source. She put her own fingertips to his temples and smiled, a strangely tremulous smile.

"Ready?" he managed.

Any lingering impetus to issue orders, level insults, had left her in the dust. "Yes." She said his name. "Please."

There was no explaining this moment to any human being, however perceptive, however beloved (except the once, the astonishing exception he was still unable to explain, but if he'd known then what he did now he'd have spared Reinette, _génie contrecarré et laissé,_ the contagion of his thoughts). No sensation of train-jumping or crossing barriers, of trespassing in the gardens of a house not one's own; instead, one simply _was,_ was that other person in every cell and yet still intact, still oneself. Inside each other, and turned inside out. The Doctor half-knelt atop Missy's body, the softness of her breasts flattened against his chest and her voice vibrating in his ear, urging him on, and at the very same time he lay on his back against once-crisp sheets gone limp with sweat and wet, legs apart and fingertips brushing locks of short, coarse gray hair. The silver furze on her chest was ticklish against his breasts; the linen of her rucked-up nightshirt softly scratched his belly and his cunt, open and aching and wet, was filled (you fit perfectly, _perfectly_ ) with the long curved length of her cock. She thrust hard and vigorous inside him, who would've dreamed it (but he had, she had), all that skirting and shying away but now she had him pinned down and crying out and he shifted his hips again as best he could, his clitoris (stiffened, aching, only the lightest touch to it wouldn't hurt) pressing up against her groin and it throbbed, his whole body throbbed, he couldn't take much more of this but it could never end, he might disgrace himself with tears if it ever dared end. His eyes in fact were pricking now, as overwhelmed by pleasure as his cunt and throat and all the rest of his body; he squeezed them shut, stubborn, scornful, so _she, he_ couldn't see. Couldn't laugh. Couldn't _know._

"Look at me," the Doctor ordered, implored—still in his own body, still just as much in hers—as Missy closed her eyes and turned her head away and clenched her teeth. She might welcome him into her body but didn't want him anywhere near her thoughts, reading her, _knowing_ her, she was fighting this invasion she'd sworn up and down she'd wanted. Another lie, another, another, just not the one she'd intended to tell. He wasn't turning back. He couldn't turn back, he'd disgrace himself sobbing if she made him turn back. "Look at me, damn you, please—"

Couldn't laugh. Couldn't know. Couldn't dare let him guess that that word, that one pathetic, puerile word still meant something—sometimes, occasionally, never try guessing when—coming from him, just as it did to him from her but too late now, too late, she'd demanded this invasion, this intrusion and he felt it all as she did, there was nothing but the old days, future days, left to divide them. Her eyes snapped open and she gazed up at him in a sort of amazement, feeling slender sharp-nailed fingertips brushing against her short gray hair, relishing the animal sounds, grunts of pleasure he could no longer hold back, hearing them emerge from her own throat with every thrust of her cock. Her hands, his hands, tingled and burned from this proximity, and then Missy started with surprise because now those hands felt, they _looked_ so bruised and swollen they could barely bend, as if she'd slammed them full force against something hard, like a TARDIS console, over and over again in complete indifference to the pain, and then sat down on the floor sobbing in solitary despair just like the old days, but not _their_ old days, the days long before that of nothing and no one and not even a light in the beddy-bye darkness—

 _"Get out!"_ he roared. And yet didn't wrest his head free, didn't shake her touch from his temples, and his own hands stayed right where they were.

"You showed me that!" Triumph, unexpected and wholly unplanned, turned her words to a gleeful shout. "You're—inside my mind, you know I've—kept my promise—stayed right here and now, I never—wandered—any further in—you brought that memory out, to me, you showed me! You!"

He shuddered and groaned, with a horrible pleasure, with the awful knowledge that for once, she wasn't lying. "Go—ahead, then—laugh." 

She didn't. The fury boiling breathless in his chest seized up her own, he hurt and cried out just like she did when his nails became talons, when they scratched deep at her temples and drew blood. _"Laugh!"_

She didn't. She couldn't. He was her and she was him and he'd known she couldn't laugh, he'd known it before the command ever left their mouths. She'd done what he wanted, she thought, he thought, both of them one desperate, shaking self as the final climax approached. She'd been a good bad girl, hadn't tramped about in any of his other thoughts or memories, kept her feet in the here-and-now—and then with no warning, nothing, she and he were off the path. Her feet and chest were on fire, her _one_ heart thudding. She ran in endless frantic circles, stumbling over tree roots, falling on her face, all the skin stripped from her palms but the pain didn't matter, nothing else mattered but to never stop running, from the Academy, the Cardinals, time itself (and darkness too, they were one body now and so all his boyhood night terrors were her own), the Untempered Schism that was real and unreal and was consuming her nerve by nerve, cell by cell, she opened her mouth to scream aloud in agony—

"Stop it," she begged him, in a fearful, rasping whisper. "Stop it, stop—"

"It's not me!" His nails tore again, harder, at her skin. "You showed _me_ that memory, I didn't—seek it—but I already knew! You—made sure of that!" The first waves were gripping her, convulsing their cunt, and he felt it outside and in and his voice wasn't his own. "I told you no, I told you, you never—listen! You made me—always make me—then and now— _you_ stop! _Make it stop!_ "

_"I can't!"_

Something that was her and yet wasn't, something she'd invited deep inside her was kicking its way through her in unhinged rage, slamming the doors of her own memory shut and pounding fists against them again and again, but even as she, as he nearly cried in earnest from the awful pain she realized he'd dragged her from the forest, back onto the path; the horrors were sequestered once more in their lightless cells, any tears leaking from their eyes now were of relief. He'd stopped still above (and below) her, catching his breath, the physical torment that caused to his cunt and her cock nothing compared to the cool wash of peace he'd restored—how did he always manage that, she never understood how—to both their heads (don't ever, don't _ever_ think that means I need you, no matter what I said I will never need you—). He pressed his lips to her mouth, a tenderness she'd have returned just then even if their minds were parted, even if they were two, and then they were moving inside each other, together, to the one all-consuming stopping point.

 _Thank you_ welled up from her thoughts to his and she hated herself for that, and him, but he'd closed all the doors that she, that they had never meant to open, and she could feel his excitement at one with her own, his unhidden physical bliss at fucking her. That must deserve something, just a little something—he wasn't listening to her, he couldn't hear anything but the rushing in his ears, his own voice babbling something about staying here, here and now—

"Now," he moaned, beyond himself, "now, _now—_ "

Both sensations hit him at once, just as they did her: the frantic convulsing of his own body and the sudden, glorious fall off an unbearably great height, and at the very same time the torturous grasp and blessed release of hard, throbbing waves recurring again, again inside him, he couldn't keep count, each one echoing the last yet not _the_ last for so long, such a wonderfully long time. They'd pulled their hands away in the frenzy of the last seconds, clutching again at each other's bodies like those long deprived, but he saw her eyes close tight and mouth drop open, heard the scream she let out, felt those echoes of her own orgasm still reverberating in him as his head fell heavily, helplessly to her shoulder. Her arms drew around him and she made quiet, susurrating sounds, pacifying noises, while their breaths became even and their hearts regained their slower, steadier beat (still a hard, in fact a mad charge by human standards but for them calm, so calm) once again. 

He rose up for a moment, on one elbow, and this time of his own accord put his palm against her breastbone; as if needing to assure himself just one more time, as if needing to know once again that he hadn't imagined its doubled, endlessly echoing pulse. He pressed his forehead back against her shoulder. One of her hands rested in his hair. He, and she, fell deep asleep.

******

He awoke with his breath short, twisting in the bedsheets, and then realized why: Missy, still naked, was curled up beneath him, hands resting against the backs of his thighs, slowly and patiently sucking and licking at his cock. The hazards, he thought, as his hips arched involuntarily upwards, of sleeping sprawled out every which way, you left yourself literally open to this sort of—her hair had spilled over her face, obscuring his view, and before he could stop himself he lifted some of it aside to watch; she let out a smothered giggle, a deliciously ticklish sensation, and continued. He'd been on both sides of this equation, not just the actual act but knowing the other enjoyed watching as much as receiving: Besides having his face directly between her legs River had quite enjoyed strapping a harness around her hips, placing him on his knees and, before putting them to a more straightforward use, having him kiss and suck and deep-throat an array of false cocks, just for the pleasure of watching his mouth at work. _A backup breathing system, that'd be so handy to have,_ she'd said once, a bit wistfully, as his eyes nearly leaked from the effort but he'd stubbornly, with a prideful obedience, done to one of the largest in her collection all she'd asked. She'd been astonishingly sweet after such games, River always had. That wouldn't happen now, of course. Not now.

Missy raised her head, brushed more locks of hair from her eyes. Then she smiled. "It's later," she said. "Whether you like it or not."

"You know what I like," he said. Wholly breathless now, and not just from her mouth. Or from this remnant Earth's swirling exterior dust.

Without needing to be told he drew the nightshirt over his head and off, lying back naked on the pillows, watching her. Impatience flickered over her features, a what're-you-waiting-for movement of mouth and brows; he shrugged in response, then raised his arms over his head. No bedposts or headboard to bind them to, not here. He settled for curling them around each other, each hand clutching the opposite elbow. She studied him, then nodded; that would suit. At least for now.

The section of his collarbone she had inadvertently abused, the neural atoll of which her own body was now divested, showed a few faint, livid shadows in the lantern's low light; the nail-marks she'd left on him were a fainter pink, nothing to the short, deep, reddened scratches he could now see running from both her temples nearly up to the hairline. The ones he had left there, that in such a delicate spot had to hurt like hell. She studied him studying her, gave him another little smile and shrugged in turn. 

"You don't take your eyes off me," she said. "Say anything you like, sob your guts out, scream the filthiest, nastiest, most hurtful things that fly into your head, but you don't get to look away, and you don't close your eyes."

He nodded. She brushed a finger, quite fondly, against the tip of his nose. Then kissed it. Then her smile faded.

He gazed up at her as she rolled on top of him, pinned his ribs between her knees, gave his cock one final, rather perfunctory stroke of the hand. He watched, and waited, and offered no objections. She curled her fingers over his mouth nevertheless, tightening them to stifle protests he'd never made; then she let go, slowly, and tilted her head in observation. She studied the close-crowded bruises, the thin fine cat-scratch streaks, every small detail of that seemingly innocuous patch of skin. He held his breath, and waited. She took aim. 

******

He awoke from a dream of mice, the migratory, capybara-sized ridley mice of Patalusz-Xyx-Vy who, swarming by the thousands in a thick, benign living carpet, crossed hundreds of kilometers of the Patalus Plains during breeding season to reach the Kr Taiga's nesting-trees. He'd taken Sarah to see it, so many lifetimes ago, enjoyed her surprise and delight when the first waves of nut-brown, gold-tinged, shockingly soft fur surged toward and over and around their feet, when she first heard the profoundly soothing _ronronrorrrr_ that was the ridley mouse's perpetual call and response. He hadn't told her this was a journey as hazardous and casualty-ridden as the trek of Earth sea turtles down to the shoreline, never revealed why he took such care to show her only the journey's start. The teeth and claws of predators lay everywhere in wait, including the two-legged ones who made fortunes selling other planets—Gallifrey once among them, countless lifetimes ago—whole shipholds full of thick, gloriously silky gold-tinged pelts. The sound of one snared was like the scream of a rabbit amplified beyond all endurance. And, unlike so many of the universe's other creatures, they never screamed in solitude.

Still and all, and even now, enough of them always got across. Enough of them, just now, to make the tent walls gently vibrate as they marched over and around and past it, the pat-pat-pat drumming of their footfalls landing in a steady, regular rhythm on the sides of the tent, the roof—

Rain. Was that rain he heard outside?

He was lying next to Missy, half on his side on the bed's bare mattress, its pillows and duvet and all its sheets long since flung or kicked to the tent floor; his palm rested against Missy's breast, as if he had fallen asleep cupping it and his fingers had gone slack. Her lids fluttered, a still half-mascaraed flurry that, for once, wasn't calculated mockery. She stretched and yawned, the movement making her flesh shift and once more fill his hand; then, still bleary with sleep, she shifted onto her side, rose on an elbow and touched his forehead with her palm, as though checking for fever. His eyelids were still at half-mast. She passed her hand over them, gently urging them closed again, and he complied. Rain. Rain on the roof, rainy season in the Citadel, or the Xyx Bush, or the Amazon, rain...

Minutes or hours passed him by and when he woke again, awoke fully, curled up knees to chin, the paw-pats or the rain or the ten thousand pebble-tosses hadn't stopped. He was alone in bed, fresh and verdant-smelling drafts of air wafting through the tent; he turned his head where he lay and saw its door was cracked open, its edges rustling softly in what felt like a springtime breeze. His temples ached, just a little, the inevitable comedown from a telepathic height (only the TARDIS's quiet, ceaseless intrusions didn't do that to him, but then that was different, she always was). His back ached. The muscles of his arms, the sides of his neck hurt. His collarbone, bloody hell, that ached and throbbed and burned whichever way he moved as though it'd been subjected to a bored squadron of Sontarans, as though it'd been scratched and cut and punched and even kicked until...oh. Yes. He breathed in, slowly. His ribs, those hurt too.

Something lay near his (bruised, aching) shoulder, a piece of clothing flung across the mattress for him to find waking up. He remembered this dressing-gown, plain black save for the Master's family glyph embroidered on the edge of one cuff and a tear in that sleeve, ineptly mended with too-thick red thread; whether his, the Master's or some other hand entirely had done that patchwork, that he couldn't recall. He pulled himself in increments into a sitting position, threaded his arms through it and, wincing as he slowly rose from the bed, knotted it around his waist. Barefoot, rubbing his eyes, he wandered to the tent door.

The tent had grown a small porch space, of the same black cloth as its walls, and an awning broad and wide enough to shelter them from the rain. Missy sat on the porch floor, her elbows resting on her knees and hair still hanging around her shoulders, unbound; her own dressing-gown was deep violet, a few scattered, darker flowers like random raindrops stitched on its sleeves. She turned toward him as he emerged, but he was lost in contemplation of the landscape beyond: what had been a scorched, desolate ruin was now a great carpet of rain-soaked prairie, with wildflowers of pink, orange, purple, a rich golden yellow running in streaks and patches through the tall, pale green grasses. The sky was dark not with ash and fallout but rainclouds, bruise-gray and backlit by the sun; crescents of pale blue showed through where the cloud cover broke. Here and there in the ground were signs of animal life: small heaped-up bits of dirt like anthills, open holes suggesting a rabbit warren or prairie dog burrow. Missy's oscillator still sat beneath its clear protective dome, raindrops running steadily off its surface, nearly hidden now by the rising grass.

"I told you," she said, as he sat down cross-legged beside her. "I knew you wouldn't believe me."

"Still not all that it was, is it," he replied, still gazing out at the grasses, up at the clouds. The air was clean and fragrant, the rain making it pleasantly cool, the hidden sun promising equally pleasant warmth. "How long before everything's restored?"

"Lord, I don't know—a few hours, a few days. It's like I said, it'll build itself back to pre-demolition point, nothing and nobody will ever know they disappeared. Timelines all knitted up exactly as they're meant to be. So impatient." She scowled a little, though her hearts clearly weren't in the gesture. "Oh," she added, and directed her chin at something standing off in the distance. "I forgot."

The Doctor glanced where she indicated, the place beyond a high hillock of grasses where they could both just make out a patch of bright, police-box blue. "I saw it when I left the tent," he said. And had already sensed the TARDIS's quiet return before that, there in his aching bones, as he'd pulled himself up and out of bed. "As you promised."

Missy rested her chin in her hands. "As I promised."

She looked over at him for a moment, a thoroughly neutral look as if she were simply waiting, without much stake in the answer, to see what he would do next. He remained beside her, watching the rain fall and the grass stems bend readily to the breeze.

A few days after the Master's disastrous scarabs experiment, the Doctor realized that his gift, the work-light he no longer used with the crib-sheet he no longer needed, had gone missing, that he must have dropped it from his pockets pursuing the Master into the forest. He retraced his steps to Erysich alone, not bothering to tell the still-sick, still-hiding Master or anyone else where he was going, then or later. He spied the pewter stone almost immediately, lying undisturbed beneath a clump of bushes at the forest's edge. Instead, however, of simply turning around and going back to the Citadel, he pushed forward, winding through the ankle-deep underbrush to the clearing where he'd found the Master and then much farther in, to where the trees clustered together in high, columnar walls, their interlaced branches shutting out all but the weakest light and the croaks, the cries, the caws, the ominous rumbles and roars of an alien fauna surrounding him on all sides. He could've used the stone's light, easily, to illuminate his path, but something inside him insisted on pressing forward just as he was, half-blind, three-quarters lost and utterly alone. 

Groping his way past a sticky-barked tree of seemingly limitless circumference, he stumbled over a clump of waxen white, green-veined, biofluorescent fungi whose smell was so intoxicating, he had to fight the urge to sit down right there on the forest floor and sniff all afternoon (he broke a few stems off, slipping them in his jacket, but they were extinguished, odorless crumbs by his return). Blood-red moths the size of his hand spun in perpetual wheels and circles around another clearing, mesmerized by a single penetrating shaft of sun. Shadows of every size, shape and sound loomed before him, behind him, in what should have been his worst fear come to life and yet he found all he wished to do was walk farther, wander deeper, throw himself into the unknown precisely because he couldn't, in any sense of the phrase, see where he was going. Not that the fear wasn't still lurking there inside him, jolting him alert every time his feet slid on leaf clumps or a branch brushed his face, but strangely, when he discovered he was entirely lost, fright was the last thing he felt. 

Letting himself just keep walking where he would, he found sense-memory guiding him better than any road or light: That piercing ululation from a bird he couldn't name, he'd first heard it just over _there,_ perhaps a kilometer south-south-west; it had flown away by the time he reached it, but just a few yards away he again smelled the heavy, lovely perfume of the faint-glowing fungi, the huge sticky-barked tree's thin, medicinal sap. By dozens of such small fits and starts he slowly worked his way back, through the shadowy columns, past the first clearing, into the open dry meadows he would cross to return to the Citadel. All the rest of that already fading day and every long, tedious, classroom-bound day afterward, the Doctor was outwardly at the Academy but inwardly always winding through another lowering tunnel of branches, tasting the strange sour-sweet oil from a handful of crushed leaves, following the tracks of unnamed, unseen animals who were mere glittering eyes in the distant dark. For the first time in all his life, of his own volition, he'd gone somewhere unknown that he was certain wasn't safe, and without knowing when, or how, or if, he would ever come back.

It felt glorious.

He turned to look at Missy, and only then realized she had never stopped watching him. In the stronger outdoor light the scratches he'd left on her temples looked not quite so awful as the night before, their angry redness fading and the skin around them already less swollen. She noticed the direction of his eyes, scrunched up mouth and nose in a coy little grimace and patted one of the sore spots with an almost proprietary air.

"So," she asked him, "when you do shuffle back off to Buffalo, how exactly are you going to explain this?"

She put a finger to his cheekbone, slid it upward and he drew a breath between his teeth; it smarted, under that lightest semblance of touch, as though he'd been struck all over again and he felt a vague disquiet, wondering suddenly if the puffiness he could sense around his eyes wasn't the aftermath of one of his own small breakdowns ( _sob your guts out, scream anything you like_ ), but of hers.

"Bruised?" he asked.

"On the surface, that any human could see? Nooo. Underneath, in the temporal spaces?" Her smile went from coyness to a feline satisfaction. "Solid black and blue."

"You're not exactly unscathed yourself," he said, putting a finger of his own to the scratches. "And I don't mean this."

She lifted her hand; at first, he thought, to push his away, but instead she merely ran it through the length of her hair, combing out the tangles the wind had made. "Am I? Well. Congratulate yourself then, Doctor, this new you is indeed...passable." She turned her face back toward the grasslands. "Seriously, though, and just out of curiosity, how do you intend to explain yourself?"

He considered the question, then shrugged. "I don't."

Missy was silent for a moment. She drew the dressing-gown a little tighter, examined the minutely chipped scarlet paint on her nails.

"I win," she noted. Quite matter-of-fact.

The Doctor nodded. Quite calm. "Yes. You win."

"I always win."

"Yes," he said. "It's true. Somehow or other, you always win." The wind had changed direction and now blew rain droplets closer to the porch, a scattered few spattering against his arm. "But you never do see it through, now do you?"

She stared at him. "Excuse me?"

"When have you ever really, truly stepped forward and claimed your victory? Not ever. Because if you had I'd already be dead, stone dead, before either of us ever left Gallifrey, before the Cardinals or any other entity ever handed me a single regeneration." He uncrossed his legs and extended his calves, the stretch of those muscles a pleasant self-resolving ache, and watched the rain roll down the sides of his feet, to his heels. "Long since dead, and you utterly unimpeded, free to go anywhere and conquer anyone and do anything and everything you like. But you don't ever do that, do you? Even when you have me in too much pain to think straight, or too frail to defend myself, or passed out cold with nobody else there to intervene, you never simply go ahead and do it." He raised his arms over his head for another stretch, immediately regretted it and lowered them again. "And you could. We both know it. And yet, you don't."

Missy was starting to look annoyed. "Your body isn't that new, to leave you so scramble-brained. I've killed you plenty of times and for keeps, my dear, it's sheer luck you're having this conversation with me now."

"It's true," he agreed. "You have."

"And even when it wasn't for keeps, it still got the job done. That day on the radio telescope—"

"Was just you putting the rush on what I already saw in the mirror." He raised his brows. "So impatient."

Missy sighed in exasperation. "You can never let me take pride in my achievements, can you? I must admit, I did have an eensie grudge against that version of you. All else aside, like all those centuries of screaming charred agony, and thank you so much for the heartsfelt compassion you showed me"—he snorted, which she loftily ignored—"the ones before and after him wanted me so much more. But _him_..." She flicked her fingers, brushing away an imaginary bit of dirt. "Knocked him down more than a few pegs, though, whatever you say. I blotted you right out."

"I was old," the Doctor said. "I wore my trousers rolled. I wandered the hallways of my own TARDIS for days on end, searching and searching for everyone who wasn't there, and I was the most lost one of all. Whether you'd shown up just then or not, that me was a chalk drawing in the rain, knowing it'd be blotted out. I was ready. Someday I'll be ready again. And perhaps you'll be there as the midwife, again. And perhaps you won't." He stretched out an arm, plucked a single dripping grass stem, held it up to his eyes as if checking its provenance. "And whatever you say now you've still never managed to get shot of me permanently, playing for keeps or not. Though you don't have to tell me that the thought of a universe without me, someday, somehow, is the one thing that really keeps you going."

Her face unreadable, Missy made no reply.

Everyone who wasn't there. A few weeks past, when Clara had been up to her neck in marking school papers and then off on some expedition of her own—a friend had given her flight lessons for her birthday or something like that, she hadn't wanted him watching her neophyte attempts at taxiing and rudder turns—he'd gone to see Sarah in hospital. (He looked "distinguished" now, apparently, which was an odd statement because exactly when hadn't he?) She'd had a bit of a health scare, Sarah had, one of those infernal things that plagued nearly all humans as they progressed through their middle age and beyond, but they poked and prodded and gave the all-clear and admonished her to curtail her commitments and avoid all undue stress (as if his Sarah, of all people, were the sort of pusillanimous poltroon to meekly comply with any of _that_ ). Despite the circumstances, it'd been marvelous to see her again. Those alarming adolescents who insisted on flocking about her, who'd passed her medical charts hand to hand and frowned at them as if their collective lack of expertise would somehow lend them some smashing insight, they were...tolerable enough. Particularly that somewhat odd, lanky dark-haired boy whose origins Sarah had patiently explained to him more than once but sometimes, if he were to be honest with himself, sometimes he still wondered. 

One of these days, one of these years, it wouldn't be just a scare. The inevitability of that was what it was, but that hardly meant he had to like it. And yet, compared to the young healthy ones torn from him with little or no warning, by violence, by happenstance, by his own blundering panicked cockups...at least he knew a few had led, were leading halfway happy lives but had Rose truly wanted "him," a damaged, quietly raging simulacrum? And what had become of Zoe? Nothing good, he felt certain of that. _Zoe, Reinette, River, Adric, Donna, my sweet Jamie, I'm so sorry._ Not that that accomplished anything. Not that it even really meant anything. But it was all he had left to offer them, after all that had happened. Their remains, their effects, their writings, their secrets, and his regrets and remembrance: all that ever was left behind. And their love, of course, and his, always that, but some understood that far better than others. Better than he could manage himself. 

He still had it, that light-stone the Master had given him. Stolen for him. A bit dented, from the times he'd thrown it full force at the nearest available wall, but still, he had it.

"You can't hide Gallifrey from me forever," he told Missy. "I've lost too much not to keep seeking it, no matter the obstacles you throw at me, no matter how many centuries or regenerations it takes. One way or another, I'll find it. I promise you that."

The wind caught hold of Missy's sleeve-cuffs; they inflated to bells and then fell back, water-stained, against her wrists once more. "And if you do, Doctor?" she said. "When you do? You will wish you'd never even tried to look."

"Another threat?"

"No." She looked, she sounded very near pity. "A premonition."

The cool, fresh air was a balm to frayed nerves and aching heads. Their hands rested side by side on the black cloth, neither touching the other, as they sat and watched the rain descend, the patches of blue hidden behind the clouds expand and diminish in their drifting, incremental movements. The TARDIS sat there too, far in the distance, waiting.

"Well," said the Doctor, as a tall scarlet flower near his feet filled up with rainwater, a ruffle-brimmed cup. "All as you promised."

"All as I promised." 

Missy tucked her hair behind an ear, then leaned her face against that palm as she surveyed him. "'The Doctor lies.' Isn't that what they say about you now? Incessantly? Well, I've got you beat there a thousand ways to Tuesday and you know it. You can't trust me as far as you can throw me. I lie for the pure pleasure of knowing you're still fool enough to trust me, and of how much more it hurts you because of it. You know that." She plucked a grass stem of her own, idly rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. "So you see, much as you might like to, you simply can't trust that were you to leave right now, take your eye off me, go back to your companion and your merry prankster train-hopping life, that any of this"—she held her arm out, toward the new-minted landscape—"would keep restoring itself as I said it would, or that even this would be here the next time you came back." She held the grass stem to her lips, as if to taste it, then let it fall from her hand. "Or rather, you _could_ trust in that. You could. But you won't."

The Doctor reached a hand up, rubbed at the back of his skull.

"It's almost as though you know me," he said.

"I suppose so," she said. Again, quite matter-of-fact. "I suppose so."

He drew his feet back from the raindrops, tucked them beneath his calves. "How long do you imagine it'll rain?" 

"I couldn't say," she replied. "Hours, probably. Could even be days."

"It'd be a shame," he said, "to leave just now, miss out on the moment when the rain ends. It always feels very new afterwards, very quiet. And the smell in the air, coming up from the ground. It's a good, fresh smell. Singular."

Yes," she agreed. "It is."

Petrichor. He had developed, of late, a great attachment to that scent. The bottle of it that lay in the bottom of a TARDIS trunk, unopened, its stopper permanently sealed. And, above all, the real thing.

She rummaged in a pocket of her dressing-gown, held out his cigarette case to him: two raspberry babies left, green apple, a blackcurrant. They breakfasted in silence.

"You know," she said, at length, "I really did think you were going to take that army, go out and conquer the universe in the name of virtue and rightness. Not a bluff. I really did."

"So did I," he said. "Just for a moment. But it was quite a moment."

She commandeered the blackcurrant baby, biting it in half. "Well," she said, "never stop surprising me, Doctor. Never stop keeping me guessing. For your own sake."

The Doctor smiled. His back, his ribs, his entire throat still prodded and poked him with the slightest shift of muscles, but the nagging little ache in his head had, at least for the moment, begun to fade. 

"Did I ever tell you," he asked, "about the first time Susan and I visited China?"

Missy finished off the jelly baby's remains, frowning a little as if assiduously searching her memory. "No," she said, shaking her head. "Now you mention it, I don't think you have."

"Another sandstorm," he said. He closed the empty cigarette case, placing it back in his own pocket. "Another tent."

He began to talk, slowly, allowing himself not to perform and beguile but to assemble his narrative piecemeal and with patience, as each incident and conversation re-introduced itself in his memory, and to offer up the lot with foolish, but stubborn trust that the hearer really was listening. It did seem, at least just now, that she really was listening, but even if she stopped, even if she had never really been listening at all, he was in a mood to speak, to mention certain times and places and invoke certain names in a language spoken, in this dimension, by only one other. All that afternoon, the rain fell without stopping.

END

_(Written 2015)_

**Author's Note:**

> The _Britain's Got Talent/Make a Star_ joke is a reference to the tie-in novel _Hidden Talent._ All things Erysich are my own fabrication.


End file.
